Theme Park at its Darkest

This is old news, but the recently elected mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan, has been charged by his constituency with the task of ‘cleaning up the city’. Many people will have heard of this in relation to preventing non-Dutch people going into the city to smoke weed. Van der Laan has also moved to outlaw kickboxing and MMA ‘galas’.

The one issue where [Eberhard] is strongly opposed, is the connection between upper and lower world that currently takes place in the martial arts events, and robust studies with cooperation of the police has shown that this dynamic of criminals mixing with average citizens indeed takes place at martial arts events. This is the connection that he wants to remove, and to do this would mean that the enthusiastic fighters and government must work together.

There is the usual doublespeak in relation to ‘it’s not the sport, it’s just some of the people involved’ floating around, but in any case, all the major promotions are now held in Belgium.

This entry was posted on October 27, 2012 at 8:58 am and is filed under Kickboxing with tags Belgium, Eberhard van der Laan, Kickboxing, MMA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.