Wim van Eek

Wim van Eek was born in Batavia, now Jakarta, where his father worked as director of the opium control company. As a 16 year-old, he came to the Netherlands and started playing football for GVC Wageningen. With his club he was champion of the eastern division in 1911 and 1912 but lost the final of national championship in both years against Sparta Rotterdam.

For the 1912 Olympic football tournament, van Eek was called up as the second goalkeeper replacing the injured non-Olympian Louis Marie Willem “Wiet” Ledeboer from Quick Nijmegen. He was an unused substitute for the Dutch team, that eventually won bronze. Subsequently, he joined HFC Haarlem winning the pre-season tournament for the Silver Ball in 1912.

Three years later, van Eek returned to the then Dutch East Indies, where he was first a proxy holder and, from 1939, director of the Colonial Tobacco Import Company. He married Jeanette Mathilde Elizabeth Burcharts in 1919. The couple had one son and one daughter. His sister Henrietta Augusta “Jet” and her husband Jur Haak, also a football international, were active in the resistance movement during the German occupation and eventually died concentration camps.