Everybody is off duty today. Not because of the Elevencitytour, but because it's saturday. Generally we don't work on saturdays and sundays here and today...almost the entire country seems to be in Friesland to skate or to watch and support the skaters. The Belgians think us totally crazy. Sunday the temperature will be up, so the tour had to be skated today. The roads to Leeuwarden are closed for all cartraffic because the city is goggling and the public is being adviced to use the train. The Railway Company inserted 80 extra trains and the province of Friesland inserted 100 extra buses. The fever took possession of us. We are one soul again. The skaters will start and have to skate for three hours in the darkness. It is dangerous, because they cannot see each other and the flaws and cracks in the ice that are always there in natural ice, although the ice is beautiful this year: one layer of thick, strong, hard, dark ice, but natural ice it is...so the public will help them again with many thousands of torches ashore along the route. From Leeuwarden down south to Stavoren the skaters will have the wind in the back, but from Stavoren to Dokkum up north the wind, 5-6 Beaufort, will make it a temperature of 28-30 degrees of frost right in front. The biting northeastern wind will be the worst enemy again, although they only fear the darkness. It will be a terrible tour from there again. But they want to suffer, though, because they like the roughness, the lonelyness, the room, the whiteness and the silence around. Sailing in summer or skating in winter, Friesland is special. It's getting you and nobody can exactly say why. How many of them will reach the finish and who will finish first? Tonight, after 12.30 am, when the last leisure tour skaters will be back in Leeuwarden and in the dark again, we will know...

January 4, 11.00 pm
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Foreigners call it: 'The Dutch Disease'.
The 15th Elevencitytour was a success, however accidents belong to the tour according to the board physician, and ended at 11.00 pm. But the Eleven Cities went on with the celebration, public and skaters together. For that it was, a feast, with dancing, singing and musicbands, cheers and support ashore all day and evening long, however the cold and the wind were terrible, as foresaid. Without that fantastic hundreds thousand of public, staying with the skaters all the way on the banks of the canals, without that marveillous atmosphere, the tour had been even worse. Because of the low temperature, which became even lower when it was getting dark and the terrible wind, even going up to 7 Beaufort, which wouldn't go down, the tour had been ended 1.5 earlier and the leisure tour skaters who didn't finish yet at 11.00 pm, had to be taken from the ice after all, with policecars driving on the ice, looking for the last leisure tour skaters somewhere on the icefloor between the Cities and helicopters in the sky. Over 60% of the more than 16.000 leisure tour skaters was 50+ and they are always last, for they have to start last and most are in no hurry. They are skating cosy with each other. Since you may not start without a membership of the Association of the Frisian Eleven Cities, and the board only take 16.000 members (because of the weight on the ice), apart from the competition skaters, many seniors should actually give up their membership, otherwise more youngsters cannot come in. But many of those senior leisure skaters reached the finish again and would skate the tour again.
The 306 competition skaters were already 'home' in the early afternoon, they were starting first and they were skating much faster, a steady 60 kilometers an hour, backs bended and hands on the back. And how they have suffered because of the hard wind combined with the big effort. One of the first finishers even said afterwards to one of the 2000 reporters that he asked three times to be shot...
They skated in groups behind each other untill the last meters this time, every now and then somebody else of the group on top, catching the biting wind, skating up north and after Franeker northeast to Dokkum via Bartlehiem with the northeastern wind right in front, along the white silent plains. When one of them fell because a skate came into a burst, they waited for each other, backs straight. Only in the group they could survive and they knew it. The last 200 meters before the finish however two were going to sprint in the first group, waving with their arms. There, the first group was splitting up...
Finally, at 1.20 pm, supported by an excited yelling public, Henk Angenent finished first after 6 hours, 49 minutes and 18 seconds nonstop skating in the deadly cold and the strong wind, with one meter behind him Erik Hulzebos.
And while they received their kisses and coffee from the merry public and you could hear the wind roaring through the microphones of the reporters, the following groups skated on, each group lined up, in a steady speed, backs bended, hands on the back, skating in time with each other, until the last couple of 100 meters...
Foreigners call it: 'The Dutch Disease'.