Rene Sparenberg was born in the Dutch East Indies, where his father worked in the timber industry. In 1927 Sparenberg was sent back to the Netherlands, so he could have a proper education. Originally a football player, Sparenberg took up hockey in the middle of 1930s with Hilversumsche Mixed Hockey Club. He never reached the final round of the Dutch championships with them, but was a runner-up at the Dutch Western District championships in 1937 and 1939. Internationally Sparenberg was capped 20 times with the national team and as a forward played in all five matches with the Dutch team at the 1936 Olympics, where they won a bronze medal.
In 1939, Sparenberg moved back to the Dutch East Indies to work in his family timber business. Sparenberg spent most of WWII in a Japanese POW camp, building the Burma Railway, also known as the Death Railway. After WWII and the independence of Indonesia, Sparenberg lived in Curaçao and later moved to Washington, DC in the United States, but eventually retired to Florida, where he died in July 2013. He was then the oldest living Dutch Olympic medalist and the last living pre-WWII Dutch Olympic medalist.
Netherlands