According to the CBS In 2015, 13 percent of households with an income of more than twice the average went on winter sports. This was only 2 percent of households with a below-average income. TNS NIPO states that the costs for a winter sports holiday are on average 700 euros per person per week. The social minimum income for an adult is around 1,230 gross per month.
The reason I open with numbers is because the times I said to winter sports bubble friends that winter sports are mainly something for the richer segment, I was just not hung up. After all, winter sports were for everyone. Perhaps I should have told them first what they taught us about wealth at the UvA in cultural anthropology: you are already among 10 percent of the materially richest people in the world if you have access to clean drinking water, food and healthcare, a roof above your head, are not illiterate and have a bank account in your name with sometimes money on it. It may be that I am forgetting one or two conditions, but what I have not forgotten is that – even if you were a student in the Netherlands with a rapidly increasing student debt – you could count yourself among the 10 percent materially richest in the world.
With that in mind, it is safe to say that you have to be quite rich to enjoy winter sports. Even within the privileged Dutch bubble, sports below zero degrees Celsius are not exactly within reach for the minimum.
When 25 December Austria, the most popular destination for Dutch winter sports enthusiasts, implemented new entry rules, panic set in. Anyone wishing to enter Austria had to have a booster shot and a negative PCR test or be prepared to quarantine for ten days. For winter sports enthusiasts, this was, I use their own words: a slap in the face, winter sports were kicked out of them, it was incredibly unfair. Camera crews pounced on the victims. A guy testified to the NOS that he had not been on winter sports last year either and that was the first time in his life. My heart cried.
For hard-hit compatriots, a race against time began. Christmas dinners were cancelled, Audis were loaded headlong, tickets were rebooked. “It just worked,” shouted a fortune hunter from a departure hall in an airport. From the Promised Land, those who made it through revealed their tactics: “Boostertje in Germany.” With the role that winter sports played in the virus spread at the start of the pandemic – “Winter sports and carnival have killed us”, said an experienced microbiologist at the time – winter sports enthusiasts in Austria are wiping their derrières today.
As Muslims are asked to distance themselves from co-religionists who commit attacks, I would like to ask our privileged fellow countrymen to distance themselves from this rich rabble who is prepared to give the pandemic a booster for personal winter sports pleasure not only in their own country, but also in Austria. Get away from that scum, block the selfish winter sports enthusiasts, repel them. Don’t golf with them anymore, don’t lend them your horse, remove them from the stock portfolio, let your personal assistant do that if necessary. So much for my New Years wish.
Carolina Trujillo is a writer.
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