American sports fans are gearing up for their annual bacchanalia, Super Bowl XLVI on Feb. 5 in Indianapolis. Super Bowl Sunday is an unofficial national holiday in America on which people who don't care about pro football for 364 days per year feign interest in the national passion, and everyone stuffs their face with junk food and guzzles booze.
The Netherlands also has enjoyed its version of Super Bowl Sunday even longer than America's Big Game - the Dutch TT at Assen (which takes place on a Saturday, by the way).
Hundreds of thousands of motorcycle racing fans from around The Netherlands and Europe have flocked to Assen for World Championship races every year since the series started in 1949 - 18 years before the first Super Bowl. Assen is the only circuit to conduct a Grand Prix every year since 1949, and the Dutch TT has taken place every year at Assen since 1925 except for the World War II years of 1940-45.
It didn't take long for the Super Bowl to become a monolithic giant of American marketing in which the TV commercials saved by companies just for the expensive occasion trumped the importance of the football game. And Assen isn't the same as it was 45 years ago, either. "The Cathedral" is now an emasculated track probably better called "The Chapel," crowds are smaller and probably more tame, and the paddock has the homogenized feel Dorna wants for every race in the World Championship.
But at its peak, Assen was more than a motorcycle race. It was a happening, an event, a mile marker of the European summer. The race was Woodstock on two wheels, as seen in this video. It was a simpler, gentler time, when sex was safe and racing was dangerous. And both occurred in copious amounts at the circuit on TT weekend.
Perhaps the closest event in American sport to Assen at its wild and innocent peak was the Indianapolis 500 during the same time, from the 1960s through the 1980s. "The Greatest Spectacle in Racing" would attract more than 100,000 fans just for Pole Day, and around 350,000 would stack like cordwood around and inside the massive Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval to watch the Memorial Day classic. Indy had its special areas of debauchery at the circuit, especially the infamous Snake Pit.
Also, the above video was made by persons who had not yet learned English.
