Dutch Americans
While the Netherlands was a small country, the Dutch Empire was quite large so emigrants leaving the mother country had a wide variety of choices. New Amsterdam was not high on their list, especially because of the Native American risk. The major Dutch cities were centers of high culture, but they still sent immigrants. Most new arrivals were farmers from remote villages who, on arrival, in America scattered into widely separated villages with little contact with one another. Even inside a settlement, different Dutch groups had minimal interaction. With very few new arrivals, the result was an increasingly traditional system cut off from the forces for change. The people maintained their popular culture, revolving around their language and their Calvinist religion. The Dutch brought along their own folklore, most famously "Sinterklaas" (the foundation of the modern day Santa Claus) and created their own as in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". They maintained their distinctive clothing, and food preferences and introduced some new foods to America, including beets, endive, spinach, parsley, and cookies.
Netherlands at the 2004 Summer Olympics
The Dutch team featured five defending Olympic champions: swimming stars Pieter van den Hoogenband and Inge de Bruijn, road and track cyclist Leontien van Moorsel, dressage rider Anky van Grunsven along with her horse Bonfire, and middleweight judoka Mark Huizinga, who later became the Netherlands' flag bearer in the opening ceremony. Star sailor Mark Neeleman, at age 45, became the first Dutch male athlete to compete in six Olympic Games since 1980 (except the 1988 Summer Olympics, in which he was selected). Shooter Hennie Dompeling sought his fifth Olympic bid as one of the most sophisticated members of the team, having missed the medal podium in the men's skeet from Sydney four years earlier. Among the Dutch athletes of the team, several of them were born outside the Netherlands and became naturalized citizens, including sprinter Troy Douglas, who competed for three Olympics under the Bermudian flag, badminton players Mia Audina from Indonesia and Jie Yao from China, and taekwondo jin Charmie Sobers from the Netherlands Antilles.