No Hands, Please: We’re Dutch

Duco Telgenkamp came to the Paris Olympics with his strategy clear in his mind. The keys, he knew, were to be decisive and clear and, above all, to go early. “You have to get your move in first,” he said. “You have to give people a sign it will be a fist bump.”

The assertiveness is necessary. Like all athletes and staff members in the Netherlands’ Olympic delegation, Telgenkamp, a member of his country’s field hockey team, was told before arriving in Paris that handshakes, high-fives and hugs were forbidden. Official team policy held that the fist bump was the only permissible physical greeting.

The Dutch approach is, of course, a legacy of the one word that nobody involved with the Paris Games likes to mention: coronavirus. Pandemic-era restrictions hollowed out the last two editions of the Games, in Tokyo in 2021 and Beijing a year later. Paris styled itself as the moment the Olympic flame could at last be — safely — reignited.

For fans, that has meant packed stands and a carnival-like atmosphere. For athletes, it has meant a completely different experience from the ones in Japan and China, where bubbles were imposed to allow the events to take place.

After qualifying for those Games, athletes had to successfully navigate a bureaucratic Covid maze. They needed multiple negative tests from specific clinics, an endless stack of paperwork, a health-tracking app on their phones and a flurry of QR codes to present to officials upon arrival.