The Netherlands has won the Baseball World Cup - or was it Curaçao? Three world-class losers also make the front pages today. We get a glimpse of the DNA of a 115-year-old and get the latest on couch-potato sport.

Curaçao champions?
Sport makes it onto almost all today’s front pages. A huge photograph on the front of de Volkskrant shows the jubilant Dutch team on Saturday with the Baseball World Cup they’d just won.

The paper says the squad beat 25-time winner Cuba 2-1 in the final in Panama on Saturday evening. The game was postponed for several hours due to rain. For people watching in the Netherlands, it started around four in the morning, local Dutch time.

Those who stayed up to see the match were amply rewarded, says de Volkskrant. They saw a Dutch team which was never outclassed by the Cubans and which deserved to win. The paper dubs the “nearly 37-year-old” pitcher Rob Cordemans man of the match. Highlighting the historical angle, it reminds us that the World Cup trophy is going to Europe for the first time in 73 years.

De Telegraaf says the team is expected back in the Netherlands tomorrow when they will be given a heroes’ welcome. Immediately after their “historic victory” Queen Beatrix sent a telegram of congratulations and Prime Minister Mark Rutte phoned the team manager.

Sports Minister Edith Schippers finds fitting words for the occasion: “The Dutch baseball team has added a golden chapter to the sporting history of the Netherlands”.

Trouw’s headline meanwhile tells us “Historic baseball victory is partly Curaçao’s”. The paper says 11 of the team have roots in Curaçao or other Dutch Caribbean islands. “A number of the players on the Dutch team live on the island,” says the proud father of one of the squad. That’s why he thinks the championship title belongs “a bit to Curaçao”.

Nothing multiplied by three
There were also sporting losers over the weekend, and AD headlines the story, “Gymnastics 3X Nothing”. The finals of the World Championships in Tokyo brought the Dutch gymnasts nothing but misery, the paper complains.

First “Lord of the Rings” Yuri van Gelder made a crash landing on his bottom, putting an end to his bid for a place on the podium. Then Jeffrey Wammes ended up in eighth and last place after another bad landing, this time in the vault. Finally, horizontal bars hope Epke Zonderland touched the bar with his foot and fell off during his virtuoso routine.

The paper rubbishes Van Gelder’s claim that had he played safe he would have won silver.

AD says their lack of success at the World Championships means the three men have failed to qualify for the 2012 Olympics in London. Their only hope now is at the pre-Olympic gymnastics qualifying event in London in January, when at best only one Dutch candidate will be allowed through to the Games.

Old age and genes
De Volkskrant runs a piece on scientific research into Hendrikje van Andel, who died aged 115 in 2005. She was the oldest person in the world and left her body to medical science. Dutch researchers have mapped her DNA and report that she had rare genes which protected her from the sicknesses associated with old age.

Her brain appears to have been “remarkably young”. At her death, the paper tells us, she had the brain of someone aged between 60 and 80. Her body showed few traces of hardening of the arteries, one of the chief causes of death in the elderly. She died of stomach cancer.

During her life, it was already obvious that she was exceptional: when she was 112, she scored above average results in memory tests designed for people half her age.

De Volkskrant says scientists have for years been searching for the genetic mutations which would allow people to live longer. Now they appear to have found what they were looking for.

At the end of the piece, it reminds us that the oldest woman in the Netherlands, Anna Goorman-Dommerholt, was 109 on Sunday. Congratulations!

Couch-potato sport
On its front page, nrc.next has a photograph of two boys slouching in chairs, computer game controls in their hands: Is this also a sport? asks the headline.

The paper reports that the Dutch electronic sports union wants playing computer games to become a recognised sport, with training, tournaments and championships. The Netherlands’ first electronic sport club was opened in Enschede on Saturday.

No more are local enthusiasts condemned to remain at home on their own, says nrc.next. They can now enjoy their ‘sport’ with other like-minded enthusiasts in the clubhouse.

Official figures, we are told, show 17 percent of Dutch 10 to 19-year-olds regularly play games on their PCs (on and offline), on a games computer (Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo) or a handheld set (Gameboy, Nintendo DS, PSP). Gamers using mobile telephones or playing via social media (Facebook, etc.) are not included in the figures.

At the club in Enschede gamers were playing each other in Counterstrike and Dance Dance Revolution matches. Their ultimate dream? Electronic games as an Olympic sport.