Olympic gold medal winners honoured with own postage stamps
2 July 2012 at 18:30 CET - Amsterdam - Today at the Amsterdam Olympic Stadium, gold medal winners Sjoukje Dijkstra, Ellen van Langen and Nico Rienks received their own postage stamps. Ger Jacobs, PostNL commercial director, presented the stamps. As the chairman of NOC*NSF, André Bolhuis also received a stamp sheet. The sheet was issued on the occasion of the NOC*NSF’s 100 year anniversary. Seven other gold medal winners are also featured on the stamps.
The stamp sheet portrays black and white photos of: Sjoukje Dijkstra, Anton Geesink, Nico Rienks, Ellen van Langen, Leontien Zijlaard-van Moorsel, Esther Vergeer, Maarten van der Weijden, Anky van Grunsven, Nicolien Sauerbreij and a hockey player as the symbol of the many Dutch gold-medal hockey successes. When you scan the stamp sheet with the Chameleon eXplorer app on a smartphone, you hear a sound fragment of sports announcer Christiaan yelling, “The Netherlands wins the gold”. The app can be downloaded via www.postnl.nl/apps.
Exertion and surrender in sound and pictures
After a great deal of study and sketching, stamp developer Robin Uleman decided to portray the drive of Olympic champions in pictures: “That is why I did not select any photos of champions celebrating as they received the award or as they took a victory lap, but rather photos of the sports performance itself. Some people show the exertion or surrender on their face, but others show their concentration or will power. When I selected the photos, I was searching in particular for photos that showed the drive or concentration of the sportsmen and sportswomen as clearly as possible.”
Availability
The stamp sheet contains ten different stamps valued at 1. They will be available from 4 July at Bruna stores, the Collect Club in Groningen as well as online via www.postnl.nl/collectclub. The stamps are perpetually valid. In addition to the sheets with 10 different stamps, two stamp folders and two first-day covers will be issued*.
* a NVPH product
Photos by Sumplusfoto
About PostNL
PostNL is the inventive partner in the world of sending and receiving. We have been so for 200 years already. We are primarily active in the fields of mail, parcels and e-commerce, but we also offer services in the areas of data and document management, direct marketing and fulfilment. Outside the Netherlands, we are active in Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium and Luxemburg. PostNL employs a total of approximately 66,000 people. In 2012 our revenues reached almost € 4.3 billion.
We like to stay ahead of things. We are the most modern postal company in the world. We are proud of that. We are an example to the rest of the world in the automatic sorting of mail, we are the first listed postal company and we are the international champion in corporate responsibility, as leader in our sector in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index 2011.
About NOC*NSF
Nederlands Olympisch Comité* Nederlandse Sport Federatie (Dutch Olympic Committee* Dutch Sports Federation), abbreviated NOC*NSF, is the umbrella association of organised sports in the Netherlands. The 90 associated national sports organisations jointly represent about 27,000 clubs with a total of more than 4.7 million organised sportsmen and women.