A furious Olympic skater pushes the fallout from the government collapse to the inside pages on Wednesday. Sven Kramer, hero of the country's national sport, hurls his sunglasses to the ground and shoves away his coach Gerard Kemkers. What de Telegraaf describes as a "huge blunder" by his coach cost Kramer an Olympic gold medal.
 
"What a b****! *****! He sent me into the wrong bend..." It's the popular De Telegraaf that quotes the devastated speed skater's most colourful language on learning that rather than winning a gold medal he had been disqualified for failing to change lanes - on the instructions of his coach.
 
"It's entirely my fault," coach Kemkers told De Telegraaf. "When I looked up I saw Sven on the outside and I thought his opponent was on the inside of the bend. That's why I shouted: inside lane!"
 
De Volksrant reports that "the man who couldn't lose" was sporting about his coach's error after he'd simmered down. When asked if he would be sticking with Kemkers as coach in future, he replied, "Everyone makes mistakes."
 
Is a Wilders boycott undemocratic?
All the papers report on the upshot of the Queen's meetings with the party leaders on what should happen now that Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's fourth cabinet has fallen apart. The Netherlands will go to the polls on 9 June, and until then what's left of the cabinet will stay on to keep an eye on the shop. But as Trouw puts it, Queen Beatrix has "put Balkenende on a chain". Until the elections the government won't be able to go ahead with any controversial policies such as road pricing or raising the retirement age.
 
But once again, blonde populist Geert Wilders and his far-right Freedom Party grab the headlines. For one thing, de Volkskrant reports that according to the latest polls, the party is likely to enter the council chamber in Almere as the largest party. Almere is one of just two cities in which the party is fielding candidates, and it looks set to take 30 percent of the vote, 10 percent ahead of its closest rival the Labour Party.
 
But it's the Labour Party's way of tackling the Freedom Party that is drawing the ire of politicians and newspaper editors alike. Labour has ruled out taking part in a coalition that includes the Freedom Party, and called on other parties to do the same.
 
"Very stupid," was Socialist Party leader Agnes Kant's response to the move. Her party has also ruled out working with the Freedom Party, says NRC Handelsblad, but would never call on others to do the same.
 
Trouw's editorial goes a step further: "Excluding the Freedom Party from the start goes against the essence of elections," it concludes, however "reprehensible" its ideas may be. Fine that the Labour Party doesn't want to govern with the Freedom Party, says right-wing De Telegraaf, "but calling others to form a joint boycott is simply undemocratic". The paper accuses the Labour Party of trying to import the idea of the 'cordon sanitaire' from Belgium, where parties have clubbed together to exclude the far-right Vlaams Belang. Left-of-centre de Volkskrant's take on the matter is "don't do the Freedom Party the honour."
 
Smoking or non-smoking?
The latest episode in the smoking ban saga is the other big topic in Wednesday's headlines. The Supreme Court "made mincemeat" of earlier court rulings that small bars with no employees should be exempt from the smoking ban.
 
Since September last year, small bars have been thick with smoke again pending a Supreme Court decision on whether the current law, based on staff health and safety, should apply to small cafes with the boss behind the bar. Now the court has "brought an end to all the confusion," says De Telegraaf. The ashtrays will have to be taken back off the tables. Or, as AD puts it, the collection box to raise money to pay the fines will have to go back next to the ashtrays.
 
"Here we'll just keep on smoking," one small bar owner says in AD. "The battle isn't over," an anti-smoking ban campaigner tells Trouw. Now the cases of two small bars that were originally cleared of defying the ban will have to go back to court, and the opponents are pinning their hopes on the defence that big cafes with smoking rooms offer unfair competition to the small bar. As one of the bars' owners tells Trouw, "This means the whole show starts all over again."
 
Woman spoons her way out of jail
AD tells the story of a prison break in the southern city of Breda worthy of an action movie. The paper prints diagrams showing how a 35-year-old woman dug her way out of jail with a spoon. With two years of her sentence left to serve, she apparently unscrewed a trapdoor in the kitchen then tunnelled her way under the prison wall and came up through on the pavement in the street outside.
  
"A pile of sand and newly-replaced paving stones were the only trace of what was perhaps the Netherlands' most unusual prison escape ever," the paper comments. "We'll have to see how this was possible," says a prison governor, "but this isn't a prison you can break out of with a loaf and a file." No, evidently it's a spoon you need.
 
Amsterdam reduced to 'sterdam'
Nrc.next reports a bizarre theft in the capital. The giant letters A and M which make up part of the city's tourist logo 'I Amsterdam' in the square behind the Rijksmuseum have vanished, leaving behind a forlorn 'I sterdam'. The Amsterdam-based Het Parool says it remains a mystery how the thieves managed to get away with the huge steel letters, together weighing 500 kilograms, in an area that isn't even supposed to be accessible to vehicles.
 
De Telegraaf is able to report that the theft was actually recorded on security cameras at the crack of dawn. The next twist was that two letters promptly turned up on an internet auction site, offered for sale by a curiously-named Erik Gilliroam. De Telegraaf adds to the mystery by reporting rumours that electronics giant Sony could be behind the theft. Huh? Well... on Wednesday Sony launches a new computer game entitled 'Origami Killer' - an anagram of Erik Gilliroam!