Cycling analyst Marijn de Vries had to deal with misconduct at NOS Sport for years: “Imagine that your colleague only uses foul language for days on end” | Abroad

In her column, the Dutch journalist describes in great detail the denigrating situations she found herself in. She starts with an anecdote from a few years ago, when she was allowed to participate in a report for ‘De Avondetappe’, a program that follows the Tour de France.

“Imagine how fantastic that is, if you love cycling as much as I do,” she writes. “Imagine ending up in the car next to a colleague who only talks foul language for days on end. Sometimes there is someone else in the car, but most of the time you are alone with them. Then he talks about females. And fuck. About which bitches he fucked, by name and surname. Which bitches he still wants to fuck. And which bitches are in line for him.”

De Vries confronted her colleague about the foul language he used, and reported it to an editor-in-chief. A year later, she again noticed “a strange atmosphere”. The situation she reported about a year earlier was laughed off by colleagues at that time. She was told that she “really shouldn’t be afraid to get in the car with him.” “Everyone is laughing. And you stand there. Only. No one will stand next to you. Imagine being the nice TV analyst in that atmosphere. With the dirty chatterbox opposite you at the table. Can you imagine what that is like?”

If she is no longer welcome after that, and raises the matter with her editor-in-chief, nothing is done about it. “Imagine how that eats at you. How to start doubting yourself. How powerless you feel. How not to deal with that. Six years ago, women with such stories were rarely taken seriously. You imagine everything. You’re the one who’s crazy. You’re just not good enough. You are wronged, you are a bitch. It’s up to you. In the meantime you have become one of the regular cycling analysts on Belgian television. So it can’t be that you’re not good enough.”

On Belgian TV, de Vries is, as she herself points out in her column, a fixed value as a cycling analyst at Sporza, the sports editor of the VRT.

After it was announced on Thursday that there will be an additional follow-up investigation into the dozens of reports of transgressive behavior on the sports editors of the NOS, de Vries decided to get into the pen. In this she is frank, without naming names. “Imagine that there is now suddenly an inventory, which shows that you are not crazy. And not the only one. That everything you suspected is just right. How would you feel? I do know how I feel. What happened there touched me to the core. It damaged my career, but mostly me as a person. It was eating me dry, inside. Imagine never being able to tell anything about that. Because without the evidence that is now there, you would not have been believed.”

The NOS did not mention the names of people about whom complaints have been received on Thursday. Presenter Jack van Gelder told HLF8 on Thursday that two reports have been made about him. The NOS could not be reached for comment on Friday. The State Secretary for Justice and Security Eric van der Burg calls de Vries’ column on Twitter “very violent”. “It screams for action, but above all that we have to stand in front, behind and next to Marijn and others.”

Until 2010, De Vries was editor of the sports program ‘Holland Sport’. Since 2013 she had a column in ‘Trouw’, succeeding Mart Smeets, and she was a cycling analyst for the NOS, including in the television program ‘De Avondetappe’. Together with Nynke de Jong she wrote the book ‘Woman & Bicycle, handbook for the cycling woman’. Last year, the columnist switched to ‘NRC’, where she also writes journalistic background stories.