Sport in the Netherlands Sport in the Netherlands Approximately 4.5 million of the 16 million people in the Netherlands are registered to one of the 35,000 sports clubs in the country. About two thirds of the population older than 15 years participates in sports weekly. Football, or soccer, is the most popular sport in the Netherlands, with field hockey and volleyball as the second and third most popular team sports. Ice-skating, tennis, gymnastics and golf are the four most widely played individual sports. A number of native Dutch sports are also practiced, such as fierljeppen (Polsstokverspringen), beugelen, kaatsen, klootschieten, kolven and korfball. Organization of
Sport in Australia governments, and local governments. In the late 1990s, government support for sport was double that of public non-financial corporations. Amateur sport was transformed in Australia in the 1980s with the creation of the Australian Institute of Sport. The Institute, formally opened by Malcolm Fraser in 1981, was designed to make Australian amateur sport at major world competitions, like the Olympics, competitive with the rest of the world and increase the number of medals won by the country. A few years later, in 1984, the Australian Sports Commission was created to better address the distribution of funds to support sport. It