It is never too late to start skating
In 1965 I became member of the cricket club Hercules in Utrecht. Cricket is a sport that is very popular in the old member countries of the British Common Wealth while there are also a few people outside these countries who play this sport. Egbert Lambers was one of them and I met him as one of the members of our team that would become very successful in the next years. We were both not the most gifted players in this game but we enjoyed it a lot. When the level of the game became too high for us we stopped playing. At that moment, around 1974, we lost also contact.
This remained so till we met again 16 years (and a part of a professional careers) later. It was at the artificial skate track of Amsterdam. For him this was the beginning of a new career. He started with skating lessons as member of the skate club “De 5 dorpen”. First of all he trained for tour skating. I had at that time already skated two times the real “Elfstedentocht” and skated my first “alternatieve Elfstedentocht” in 1991. I told him how nice an experience that was. That stimulated him to try to do the same in 1992. Although this tour was very hard for him, he made it and after being recovered from this effort, he realized that he liked this experience very much and wanted to continue with this activity. This meant that he, in 1993, on the age of 50, started his training to participate in marathon skating. I saw him improving his style very rapidly and I was getting afraid that he soon would be faster than me. I did my best but I could not prevent this to happen. Several years he participated in marathon races for people above 50 years of age (so called masters) on the artificial skating tracks in the Netherlands. Since 1992 he also participated every year, when it was possible, in the “Alternatieve elfstedentocht” on the Weissensee till 2010.
In the mean time, as an enthusiast member of the skating club “de 5 dorpen”, he was asked for the board of the club and soon he became the chairman, a function that he fulfilled from 1996 till 2007. After that he was asked to become the president of the Section Marathon skating of the Royal Dutch Skating Association. He fulfilled this function from 2007 till 2014. In this period marathon skating developed itself to a professional sport performed by extremely well trained and dedicated sportsmen and sportswomen mainly from the Netherlands but also some people from other countries.
Egbert Lambers has shown that one is never too old to learn skating. He enjoyed it even so much that he spend a lot of his spare time, besides his work as lawyer, on this sport in management functions.
Because of his knowledge about the development of the Marathon skating sport he is the best person to contribute to my website a section about the very exciting sport of Marathon Skating.
Egbert Lambers has shown that one is never too old to learn skating. He enjoyed it even so much that he spend a lot of his spare time, besides his work as lawyer, on this sport in management functions.
Because of his knowledge about the development of the Marathon skating sport he is the best person to contribute to my website a section about the very exciting sport of Marathon Skating.