Max van Gelder

Max van Gelder’s first athletic pursuit was football, but he took up water polo as a goalkeeper in the 1930s and eventually focused exclusively on that sport, earning three Dutch East Indies titles. His career was disrupted by World War II, during which he spent three and a half years as a prisoner in a Japanese camp. Following his release, he moved from the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands and continued his sport of choice, eventually making the national team. In 1950 he won a gold medal at the European Championships and, two years later, was selected to represent the Netherlands at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. There, the squad finished fifth after defeating all of their opponents in the qualification round. His next stop was the 1954 European Championships, where the Dutch finished just off the podium in fourth. He also qualified to attend the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, but the Netherlands boycotted those Games following the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

Gelder was employed as an actuary upon his arrival in the Netherlands, but was eventually able to follow his true passion of working in the medical field. Trained as a physiotherapist, he travelled to the Olympics with the team for every edition between 1964 and 1976. He also had a successful career as a master’s level athlete, until breaking a hip in a fall.