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NOS News•today, 20:40
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Almost 35,000 walkers completed the festive last leg of the Nijmegen Four Days Marches today. The first participants crossed the finish line before 09:00. Everyone had to be in by 6pm.
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The last walking day of the Four Days Marches, which this year because of the heat lasted three days, started this morning with about four hundred less runners than yesterday. Over the course of the day, about a hundred more participants dropped out. On Wednesday, nearly 37,000 hikers had started the walking event.
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The Four Days Marches runners were traditionally welcomed with gladioli on the St. Annastraat in Nijmegen, renamed Via Gladiola. More than 100,000 spectators cheered them on:
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After heat and dog weather, Four Days Marches runners are back in Nijmegen
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The first stage of the Four Days Marches, which was to be run on Tuesday, was canceled due to the heat. According to the hiking event’s weather advisory team, it was not responsible for the participants as well as for the volunteers and medical teams to let the event go on that day.
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It was about 37 degrees in Nijmegen and surroundings on Tuesday. Several hundred Four Days Marches participants decided to walk that day, although the organization advised against doing so.
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Heat faints, hypothermia and blisters
The Four Days Marches therefore did not start on Tuesday, but on Wednesday. On that day it was also well above 30 degrees in the afternoon. The Red Cross says that “remarkably many runners” have suffered from this. They suffered, among other things, from heat fainting and rashes due to the heat.
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On the second walking day it rained a lot and it became almost 10 degrees cooler than Wednesday. Then several hikers had to be treated at the medical posts along the route for hypothermia symptoms, according to the Red Cross.
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The aid organization says it has treated a total of about 3000 Four Days Marches runners this year. Nearly 1800 of them came for a blister treatment. Red Cross volunteers used a total of 10,000 lancets to puncture the blisters in the past three days.
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The board of the De 4Daagse Foundation is satisfied with the course of the 104th edition of the Nijmegen Four Days Marches. Mars leader Henny Sackers says it is fantastic to experience another arrival after three years. “It’s one big party.” The Four Days Marches has been canceled for the past two years due to the corona crisis.
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No farmer’s protest after all
It was expected that members of the Farmers Defense Force action group would also come to Via Gladiola today to demonstrate against the cabinet’s nitrogen policy. Also on previous Four Days Marches, some protesting farmers stood along the route. The farmers’ action group had – after the necessary legal wrangle – received permission to be present today with a maximum of fifty demonstrators and one tractor.
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Early this morning, however, it turned out that there was a snack stall at the place where the farmers were allowed to demonstrate. Farmers Defense Force then decided to move to another location: a pasture belonging to a Limburg cattle farmer along the Four Days Marches route.
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Nijmegen mayor Bruls says to Broadcasting Gelderland that he is surprised that the activist farmers stayed away from Nijmegen “without further comment”. According to FDF leader Mark van den Oever, the municipality did not keep to the agreements because the demonstration site was occupied. However, the municipality says that the snack stall has moved to a different location and that the site was therefore simply free in the end.
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