Beep – the alarm goes off, it is 6am. It is dark. A small group of skaters drag themselves out of bed, throw some warm clothes on and grab their skating bags. We walk outside and fumble around in the darkness trying to activate the lights on our bicycles. 40 minutes later we are warming up on the ice in Ijsbaan Twente, in Enschede, near the Dutch-German border – we are the only people there. It is still dark.
There is something unusual about this team. We train in the Netherlands, but we are not Dutch. We aren’t even European ... [more]