NADB Anniversary 21/10/2017

Ladies and Gentlemen!

It is an important anniversary which you are celebrating. 50 years make for the kind of milestone whose passage calls not only for an anniversary bash, it should also be looked upon as an opportunity for strategic stocktaking and planning.

Some of you may remember that WDSF did precisely that in 2007, when it turned 50. His Excellency Juan Antonio Samaranch addressed the General Meeting in Barcelona and dispensed valuable advice. With the encouragement of the IOC Honorary President for Life, IDSF, as it was still known then, set out to redefine DanceSport – to take a more holistic view on the sport – and to create the structures for an organisation which serves as the cohesive force between different stakeholders in dance as sport. 

VISION 2012 tied in perfectly with our 50th jubilee, serving as the inspiration and the motivator which carried us over to the next milestone, to the World DanceSport Games in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. From there, the VISION 2020 ensued. The new development plan aims to bring our sport to the next level and to make WDSF compliant with the highest standards in governance. Ambitious goals which proved to be less elusive than some of us had feared.

Nearly two decades after DanceSport was recognised by the 106th IOC Session in 1997, one of its disciplines made it onto the programme of the Buenos Aires 2018 Youth Olympic Games.

Having gone full circle with an ambition to see dancers compete alongside the other athletes for the most coveted medals in sports, we reach this milestone with the conviction that the contingent of 24 b-boys and -girls will deliver on what we have pledged. Stunning one-versus-one battles in the Argentine capital less than twelve months from today!

Tomorrow – in Essen, German – seven b-boys and -girls representing the Nederlandse Algemene Danssport Bond will join some 150 of their peers from Africa and Europe to contest the 30 odd places assigned to the two continents in next year’s WDSF World Youth Breaking Championship in Kawasaki, the final qualifier for the YOG.

I do hope that they will be successful tomorrow as s well as in May 2018, and that the Netherlands will qualify two breakers for the Buenos Aires YOG. I then count on the NOC*NFL, represented here by Mrs. Mesker, to reserve two places on Team Holland for them.

To get back to my original thought on your 50thanniversary: I would like to thank the NADB for inviting me to this party and the dancing that goes with it. With the Topsportcentrum at the Pierre-de-Coubertin Laan you have picked the perfect location as well as an appropriate address for both. Mayor Peeters, you are celebrating the first decade in the existence of this splendid venue, I salute you and the City of Almere too.

I raise my glass for a toast, congratulating you – NADB and Almere – on your decades of history and encouraging you to do as you did so successfully up to now. Continue to write on this history with every day that passes, don’t stop – ever! Continued success is about keeping in motion – and in tune with the ever-changing rhythms of time. Proost!