Leffert Oldenkamp is skating through the gloomy, icy, and foggy morning on January 18, 1963.
The wind is freezing, the temperature is a bone-chilling -18C, and he hasn’t slept much at all.
Skating nearly 125 miles on uneven natural ice through the desolate winter landscape of the Dutch province of Friesland is one of the hardest sporting tests he’s ever faced.
This is the renowned “Eleven Cities Tour,” or Elfstedentocht, an unparalleled test of mental and physical stamina.
Out of the thousands who started, only a small number of competitors survived the brutal 1963 edition.
Reinier Paping, the victor, rose to fame as a national hero. Among those few who followed him home was Oldenkamp.
Only three more iterations of this incredible event have taken place in the sixty years since it first occurred, with the most recent one occurring in 1997.
LISTEN: Sporting Witness: Inside the Elfstedentocht
It is nevertheless still a national obsession in the Netherlands despite its rarity. Conversations about the ice quickly shift to whether it will actually happen this year when a cold snap arrives.
Now, there’s a hint of fear in those conversations that the response might be, “never again.”
Wiebe Wieling is a man assigned a very peculiar mission. Every year, he oversees the planning of an event that is very unlikely to take place.
The Royal Society of the Frisian Eleven Cities, or Koninklijke Vereniging de Friesche Elf Steden, is led by Wieling.
It is the organization in charge of organizing the Eleven Cities Tour, an intense marathon cross-country skating competition held across the lakes and waterways of the northern province of Friesland.
Before midnight, participants must finish the nearly 200-kilometer course, and they must get a card stamped in each town to verify their progress.
