News

Calling lap times from the couch: a love letter to Thialf 2030

13/05/2026 – by Natasja Paulssen (CEO/Founder of 4DR Studios)

So yesterday the news landed that the speed skating at the 2030 Winter Olympics will most likely come to the Netherlands, and I have been quietly grinning about it ever since.

I have been calling lap times from the couch since I was little. (The kids coming up are starting to break every record I had memorised, which is, honestly, the best kind of problem to have.) The idea that Thialf might host an actual Olympic event in four years is doing things to me.

You can hear the careful question between the lines of every skater interview already. Will it really feel like an Olympics in Thialf, or will it land as just another World Championship in our own backyard?

Let’s build them a big surprise. We Dutchies are very, very good at turning sport into something the whole country lives through together. Are you old enough to remember the last Elfstedentocht? Saturday 4 January 1997. Live on television from before sunrise until past sundown, daily life basically on pause, every café tv tuned in, every kid pulling skates out of the shed the moment the last rider crossed the line. All-day live broadcast was a brand-new idea back then. With our winters the way they are now, we are probably never getting another tocht. But we can absolutely build the next leap.

Decades on, that same innovative instinct keeps showing up, only louder. Zandvoort folds into a sea of orange and live music every Grand Prix weekend, grandstands moving in waves, the dunes one long open-air celebration. For football, the Oranje supporters have walked their 50th march to the stadium by now: kilometres of drums, dancing, busts of Cruijff and Gullit lifted overhead.

What if we took the all-day live-tv ritual of the Elfstedentocht, the festival energy of Zandvoort, the joyful walk of the Oranje Parade, and stacked all of it on top of two weeks of speed skating in 2030? Every day, from the first heat in the morning to the last medal at night.

The biggest speed skating event this country has ever had. And let’s show it to the world.

Speed skating fans add one very important thing: we are not only cheering for the Dutchies. A Dutch crowd cheers for every skater who steps on that ice, in every country’s kit. That is exactly why Thialf is the right home for this, and exactly the chance to show the world that real sport can be fiercely competitive and deeply unifying at the same time.

That is not a thing one company makes. This is what we create all together.

Our contribution is the immersive one. The PSV Brainport Fan Cam we toured through the region in 2023 is the closest sibling: fans stepped in next to the first team at the stadium, walked away with a share-ready video, the squad refreshed every season.

For 2030, picture two formats.

A Fan Cam, physical and mobile, at every IJsbaan and skating club in the country in the months running up to the Games — you step in, pose next to Jutta Leerdam or Jordan Stolz, and the video is on your phone before you have laced your skates back up.

And alongside that, a Portal, physical and mobile, a live virtual window into Thialf, dropped into the French Olympic host villages (Nice, Albertville, Méribel) — a live bridge between Thialf and the rest of the Games, so one Olympics is felt across two countries in real time.

Let’s build this together, as Dutchies. Where can we join?