At every Olympics since Barcelona in 1992, the Dutch have excelled not only in sports, but also in partying. The Holland House, a massive nightly celebration sponsored by Heineken, has become an Olympics institution, giving fans an opportunity to meet Dutch athletes, entertainers and politicians.

But as organisers try to bring the Holland House to the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the Canadian government is putting up a bureaucratic blockade that threatens to kill the fun, according to Vancouver Sun columnist Milo Cernetig.

The plan is to build the Holland House in a hockey arena in the city of Richmond, near the Olympic Speed Skating Oval. While the town initially welcomed the House, Mr Cernetig told Radio Netherlands they’ve started making impossible demands. 

Codes and regulations
For starters, all the kitchen equipment brought in for the Holland House has to be approved for use in Canada. The temporary construction also has to meet strict building codes and contain permanent plumbing and gas lines. Worst of all, the British Columbia liquor board wants to limit the number of partygoers to 1,500, less than half of what past Houses have entertained.

And as for the hundreds of Dutch employees flown in for past Holland Houses, the federal government is demanding the organisers first attempt to hire Dutch-speaking Canadians, as is the rule for foreign companies operating in Canada. Mr Cernetig says the Canadians are not inherently anti-fun.

“I think this is just a case of the bureaucracies going a little bit crazy. Each one looking at their own little piece and not understanding that it’s the Olympics and they have to be a little bit more flexible than they usually are.”

Nightclub
Geert Slot, a spokesman for the Dutch Olympics committee, confirmed that the Canadians were, among other things, making an issue of local employment. But he thinks the red tape will give way once the Dutch better explain their intentions to the Canadians. 

“What we’ve noticed is that they quickly view something like the Heineken House as a nightclub, for example, for which there are then regulations limiting the number of people to 1,500. Whereas an event hall, for example, could contain many more. This means we need to do a lot of explaining as to exactly what we’ll be doing there.”

Embarrassing fiasco
The most recent success for the Holland House came at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Can we conclude that the Canadian bureaucracy is worse than the Chinese one? Mr Cernetig:

“I’d like to think that we’re not more obstructive [than the Chinese], but right now I think if you asked the Dutch organisers they would say we are. We’ve got to get this sorted out otherwise it will be very embarrassing. I think the only thing that’s going to help this now is intervention by some of the politicians, who just tell the bureaucrats to step down and get with it.”

Mr Cernetig worries that the Dutch organisers will pull the plug on the party, but Mr Slot denies that the committee is considering anything drastic.

“This will be solved because Canada values hospitality and because we will follow the laws of the country. We’re going to sit down and see if we can come to an agreement. I think everything will be perfectly fine.”