Sport in the Netherlands
overview of sport in the Netherlands
Approximately 5 million of the 17 million people in the Netherlands are registered to one of the 35,000 sports clubs in the country. About two thirds of the population older than 15 years participates in sports weekly.
Football is the most popular sport in the Netherlands, with field hockey (including indoor hockey) and volleyball as the second and third most popular team sports. Speed skating, cycling, tennis and golf are the four most widely played individual sports. A number of native Dutch sports are also practiced, such as fierljeppen (polsstokverspringen), beugelen, kaatsen, klootschieten, kolven and korfball.
Organization of sports began at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Federations for sports were established (such as the speed skating federation in 1882), rules were unified and sports clubs came into existence. A Dutch National Olympic Committee was established in 1912. Thus far, the nation has won 356 medals at the Summer Olympic Games and another 147 medals at the Winter Olympic Games.
An influential figure in Dutch sport was Pim Mulier.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sport in the Netherlands” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.