The classic skating races on natural ice in the Netherlands
Before we are going to write about “Marathon skating” on the next page something has to be said about speed skating races in general on natural ice in the Netherlands which was the type of sport activity which has led to the development of “Marathon skating”.
As I have mentioned before already in the 18th century people skated long tours on the canals going from city to city . This activity has also been reported in the 19th century. In general these tours were made by small groups of skaters on individual basis. This situation changed when the idea came up to organize skating races. The 200km long “Elfstedentocht” is the most famous one but there were several more. Such races through the country site can only be organized if one can be sure that no problems will occur to the participants in the race. This means that such races require a lot of organization, certainly when the number of participants increases. For this reason it is very difficult to realize very long races and tours. Therefore the Elfstedentocht could only be organized 15 times in 100 years namely in 1909, 1912, 1917, 1929, 1933, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1956, 1963, 1985, 1986 and the last one was held in 1997. Since then the Elfstedentocht could not be organized anymore and it seems that the time between the events gets longer and longer.
As I have mentioned before already in the 18th century people skated long tours on the canals going from city to city . This activity has also been reported in the 19th century. In general these tours were made by small groups of skaters on individual basis. This situation changed when the idea came up to organize skating races. The 200km long “Elfstedentocht” is the most famous one but there were several more. Such races through the country site can only be organized if one can be sure that no problems will occur to the participants in the race. This means that such races require a lot of organization, certainly when the number of participants increases. For this reason it is very difficult to realize very long races and tours. Therefore the Elfstedentocht could only be organized 15 times in 100 years namely in 1909, 1912, 1917, 1929, 1933, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1956, 1963, 1985, 1986 and the last one was held in 1997. Since then the Elfstedentocht could not be organized anymore and it seems that the time between the events gets longer and longer.
Because there was a lot of interest in such races and tours local skating clubs organized shorter races and tours. For example in 1920 the “Elka Watch rondrit” was organized. The name indicates that a business firm sponsored this race with as prizes for the winners Elka watches. This race over 100 km started in the north of Amsterdam in a village Nieuwendam and finished there too. This is a tour that is still very popular to people from Amsterdam like me. It is a very nice tour in the winter, skating on the canals, but also in the summer, skating on the roads. In 1920 the winner was Coen de Koning, Earlier he won in 1912 and 1917 also the “Elfstedentocht”.This was the first skating race next to the “Elfstedentocht” but there followed many more. On the map you can see the places where races of more than 50km have been organize through time. It will be clear that all these races cannot be organized every year. In fact in some years none of these races could be organized. This happened for example between 1997 and 2009.On the other hand there are years that several races were organized even on the same day. For example in 1996 on 4 January and on 2 February there were two races at the same day. In the same year there was also a week that 4 races were skated. An impression of these races can be seen in the video below. It starts with a statement of a famous Dutch skater who says that skating on natural ice is like “heaven” and the journalist says then: “So we are going to see 4 ice classics skated in the heaven”. Do you remember the discussion I published “Is skating divine?” There are more and more Dutch atheists, maybe they substitute their religion by skating. There is reason for that as you can see in this video. Unfortunately there are some short discussions between the races but just go on because each of these four races shows a different part of the "heaven".
It will be clear that people cannot train permanently for races which occur only occasionally, when there is an ice period and then make themselves free from their work to skate several races in this short period. As a consequence, after the “elfstedentocht” of 1986, alternative solutions for this problem were tried out. These solutions will be discussed in the next pages.