Imagine if the real Superbowl wasn't held in 24 years due to global warming and may never happen again, perhaps then it would be more of a priority.
But other than popularity there's big differences. Both Superbowl and world cup are highly organized, highly commercial events, planned way in advance, where top athletes perform.
The Elfstedentocht always comes unexpectedly. When there is a cold snap in the weather, a fever starts brewing among the population. As ice grows thicker people from all walks of life start to get involved to organize the event. Pumping stations stop their operation to improve ice conditions, crossings are created on patches of bad ice where one walks with skates over land (called 'kluunen'), and all across the track people start to sell hot chocolate and soup. The event is a huge social happening, not just for the top athletes. The people that come last over the finish line or the ones that just did not make it within the set timeframes are as much heroes as the winner of the tour.
Elfstedentocht is very much an event by the people, not an entertainment provided for the people.
This is not completely accurate. Sure, koek-en-zopie stuff might be organized by local restaurants or whatever, but the Elfstedentocht itself is prepared (almost) completely every single year. There is a whole foundation with internal hierarchy that oversees the process. The whole parcourse can be constructed on a 48 hour notice. The waterschappen don't stop their pumps out of hospitality or something, it is all pretty well organized.
So do they get compensation?
Presumably making the effort to allow skating is a vote winner. Even in places outside Friesland, when it looks like skating will be possible various authorities take steps to encourage ice formation by closing sluice gates and stopping boat traffic.
There is a great documentary (in Dutch) that shows what the foundation behind the Elfstedentocht has to go through every year to make sure they're ready in case the conditions are right to organise the race, not sure if it's available outside of NL:
Given how much of a priority climate change has been in the Netherlands... I don't think so. Though I guess part of it is because it wasn't a guaranteed every-year event in the first place, so it's not that much of a change.
This is an important point for those who don't live in The Netherlands. NL has done an amazing job of marketing how 'green' they are, but has been really terrible at addressing climate change or even hitting their own climate targets.
There also may be an effect that making Dutch agriculture greener makes it more competitive, increasing output and thus offsetting improvements in efficiency.
But yes, such a rich country that isn’t really dependent on its agricultural output should be able to do more. Stopping fertilizer imports probably would help a lot.
This is more an excuse than an actual reason. Because the Dutch have large patches of shallow sea: which is ideal for building huge scale windparks that are, relatively cheap. The "ground" can still be used for fishing, so you hardly loose anything. Yet even building parks in sea is met with strong opposition. From wildlife preservation orgs to people complaining that this will ruin their view over the sea.
Furthermore, the IJsselmeer and Markmermeer have often been suggested as "energy storage" where water is pumped up a few meters by wind, or overcapacity electro. The Netherlands, has, in fact, build some of the largest dams in the world, but "forgot" to use them as power stations. Anyone who has ever visited Neeltje-Jans, for example, will see the opportunity to harvest some of the enormous amounts of water being pushed through the Netherlands. I live on the riverside of the Waal (part of the Rhine), where currently over 7000m³/second of (in winter warm-ish and in summer cold-ish) water passes by my office-window. There must be ways to harvest some of this energy.
There is a lack of will and a lack of urgency. Not a lack of opportunities.
So let’s take that 7000m³ and drop it by a meter. That’s dropping 7 million kg of water by one meter, or (if my math is right) about 70 MW of potential energy. You might get somewhat more out by decreasing the speed at which the water flows, but I doubt that would be much (the more you slow the water down, the larger the river downstream has to be)
Also, that’s if you dam the entire river. The Waal is a major river for shipping, so you can’t do that.
Finally, I think 7000m³/s is an outlier. Google gives me 1500m³/s flow rate for the Waal (and, consistent with that, 2000m³/s for the Rhine). So, on average, a system damming of the whole river, requiring all ships to go through locks, would produce about 15MW.
And I think my math is at least in the right ballpark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauharnois_generating_station generates “up to 1,903 MW of electrical power”, but it has a water drop of 24 meters, and runs in a river that has an average discharge about equal to that peak of that of the Waal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lawrence_River: “The average discharge at the river's source, the outflow of Lake Ontario, is 7,410 m³/s”), and, I would guess, is designed for somewhere around that average discharge, dropping surplus water over an overflow system. So, that would account for a factor of 24 (times the height) × 5 (flow rate)
The math is simpler though: potential energy is massXheight. So any one of those can be high. Small hydropower (I built this in Switzerland for fun) using a long pipe and a reversed pump can deliver significant power from a tiny brook, if the height is enough.
If you increase the height of the entire IJsselmeer with 10cm, that is an enormous mass, a gigantic potential energy.
Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue.
The temp diff is another potential energy. As is the kinetic energy (the water is going really fast!).
We can spend hours debating why things cannot be done, but that has never brought innovation.
Also, building stuff “for fun” is different from doing things at scale and come out ahead. As you say “Whether one can economically extract that power is a different issue”, but, in this context, IMO of utmost importance.
I don’t think there are easy gains at scale to be had there.
There’s a reason only a few small plants exist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity_in_the_Nether...)
Uh, I'm not too familiar with the Superbowl, but the title of 'most popular televised sporting event in the Netherlands' definitely goes to the football world championship.
It's not hard to compete for that title when your competition hasn't had a televised event in 24 years...
It's just not a very fitting analogy.
But the point of the analogy was not to make a perfect equivalence to the Elfstedentocht, that would be impossible. The point was to convey to an American audience some semblance of the national importance of this particular sporting event.
The world cup is great for sitting together and drinking beer. But we can do that without winning.
Source? The last Elfstedentocht in 1997 had 9.2 million people watching it [1], while the semi-final of the Dutch national team in the world cup in 2014 had 9.1 million people watching it [2], and population had grown by ~1.5 million people in between.
[1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijftiende_Elfstedentocht#Reco... [2] https://kijkonderzoek.nl/component/kijkcijfers/file,j1-6-1-p
Superbowl doesn't do it justice, it's much more than that.
I don't think that is a good comparison. The Superbowl is held every year, but the Elfstedentocht has always been a rare event depending on extreme winter conditions. From the first event in 1909 until 1997 there have been 15 of them, with the longest break between 1963 and 1985.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/feb/10/sweden-ice-sk...
The medal count at the 2018 Winter Olympics might be a good starting point, look at how the Dutch dominated that event[0]. Keep in mind that we're a really tiny nation, so that suggests a disproportionate amount of Olympic-level speedskaters per capita. Which only makes sense if it's a really big sport here.
Another example: I assume that when you ask the average American who Shani Davis is you'll get a blank stare, despite his great achievements[1]. Ask the average Dutch person and they'll know, and might even tell you about "that cute fridge-scene with the Erben Wennemars picture"[2][3].
Now let's compare other nations where speedskating is still a thing. Nao Kodara might be a bit more famous in Japan than Davis is in the US, but check out her Twitter bio and you'll see a photo of the Elfstedentocht monument[4][5][6]. To professional speedskaters all over the world, the Dutch are an example (the fact that we often love them more than most people in their own country probably doesn't hurt either).
So yeah, speedskating is deeply embedded in the Dutch national identity, arguably even more than soccer because it feels like our sport.
You do make me wonder if narratives around national identity work a little differently on smaller scales though (remember that the Netherlands is a small nation of about 17.5 million people). Maybe the US is too big for a thing like this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_skating_at_the_2018_Wint...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shani_Davis
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWNKa6eK2NU
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erben_Wennemars
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nao_Kodaira
[5] https://twitter.com/Nao_kodaira
[6] https://yktoo.com/en/blog/post/2015/11/22-the-monument-of-el...
That said, the same things you said hold for Korfball as well, which definitely doesn't whip up the same fervour as an Elfstedentocht does.
I think you yourself don't realise that not everyone in the Netherlands cares about speed skating and the Elfstedentocht.
I'm Dutch. Early twenties. I go roller blading in the summer, and I speed skate in the winter if weather permits.
But the Elfstedentocht? It has never taken place during my life. My friends and I don't care about the Elfstedentocht at all because we've simply never experienced it. We don't get the "Elfstedentochtkoorts" whenever the mercury drops below 0. Not at all.
> deeply embedded in the Dutch national identity, arguably even more than soccer
I bet the average young person from Rotterdam cares a whole lot more about Feyenoord and the Dutch football team than they care about some 200km speed skating contest that very rarely takes place in a province in the north.
But you're right that I didn't take age into account. I'm in my late thirties, I remember skating on natural ice almost every winter during my childhood. I don't know if you had the same experience.
And that was all just in Belgium.
It’s a huge thing.