Dutch Scooter Championship Won by 82-Year-Old Man

It is well known to regular readers that the Kensington Review has a soft spot for the Dutch. The latest sporting news from the Netherlands sums up the reasons. The Nationaal Fonds Ouderenhulp, a group for the elder, organized an electric scooter race, and held a competition between 12 nursing homes. As popular as NASCAR is in the US, this event does more good.

The scooters are the four-wheeled, one-person "mobility" vehicles many of the elderly or infirm use to get around. Top speed for these things is about 7 or 8 miles per hour, and the course covered 250 yards of ramps, speed bumps and slalom pylons. In short, no one could get hurt, but there was a lot more challenge to it than a jigsaw puzzle.

The Dutch have one of the highest life expectancies in the world, and as a result, there are 75,000 of these scooters in the country. It was only a matter of time before some of these pensioners decided to drag race. The Nationaal Fonds Ouderenhulp's intervention here in organizing this event prevented the geriatric delinquent segment of Dutch society from making the streets and sidewalks of Rotterdam, Maastricht and Den Haag unsafe for the rest.

More seriously, though, the need to keep active doesn't just affect those in their eighth or ninth decade. The bloating of the American waste line and the flabbiness of the American mind across the nation in all age groups are both readily traced to a sedentary lifestyle (both physical and mental). The equivalent of scooters races appears to be in short supply.

Are scooter races silly? Probably, but there are benefits, like social interaction. One of the chief fears among the elderly is loneliness, in some surveys outscoring death itself. Being part of a team or having one to cheer for, even if bedridden and able to participate only vicariously, prevents that. Reuters reported on contestant Wilhelmus Souren's reaction, "I'm 88. In the end, my battery was running out. It was very frustrating." One is almost certain he is planning a better approach to next year's race. And the Nationaal Fonds Ouderenhulp's silly little race just improved the odds of him being around for the 2005 event. Hoep Holland!


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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