Today on Oldest Olympians, we want to cover the Olympic mystery of Dutch sailor Jacq (or Jack) van den Berg, born December 19, 1916. While this date of birth means that he is certainly deceased, information on him has been difficult to locate and we are therefore featuring his case in the hopes that someone might have more details.

Thanks to research from Connor Mah, we know that although he was born in Birmingham, England, he was living in Weesp, Netherlands by 1936. He married Jannetje A. Motshagen in 1945, which led to him becoming the brother-in-law of Biem Dudok van Heel, who also married into his wife’s family and would later be part of the van den Berg’s Dragon class crew at the 1960 Rome Olympics. Van den Berg was also selected for the Dragon class at the 1956 Melbourne Games, but the Dutch Olympic Committee withdrew the crew.

Van den Berg and his wife lived in Naarden for two decades, and then Hilversum until at least 1974. After that, his trail disappears, although he was still alive in 2006, prior to his 90^th birthday, and was competing in sailing into his 80s. His wife, meanwhile, died in 2018 in Belgium at the age of 96, but there is no indication of what happened to Jack/Jacq. He is not located in Dutch registers of the deceased, either for those who died in the Netherlands or those who died abroad. This makes him a rare case of a Dutch Olympian about whom limited information can be found.

While we are on the subject of the Netherlands, we wanted to recognize an additional Olympic-adjacent centenarian. Henk Blok, born January 4, 1922, served as the coach of the Dutch men’s volleyball team at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, where the nation placed eighth. Credited as the father of that sport in the Netherlands, he died December 8, 2024, at the age of 102. Finally, we want to thank the reader who sent in links to demonstrate that one of the Olympic mysteries from the last post, Germany silver medal-winning cyclist Günter Lörke, was still alive as recently as 2017.