Heerhugowaard – The biscuits are on the table and the photo albums are ready. The first slideshow of photos is already playing on the television. Bram (79) and Ans (75) Stelling from Heerhugowaard have been dancing together for 42 years. They overcame setbacks and finished second at the World Championships.
The couple met in Sint Pancras. Bram was eighteen, Ans fifteen. Her parents actually thought she was too young for a boyfriend. “I was a late arrival in the family,” Ans laughs. “It wasn’t allowed. But I did have my eye on him.” They kept running into each other more and more: at the Vrone football fields, on Queen’s Day and at the sports club Sport Staalt Spieren.
The spark caught and they started going out. After six years, in 1972, the couple married. They had two children and got a Dalmatian, Roy.
When they were 34 and 37, a colleague of Bram’s asked whether they might want to come along to dance classes. Bram had taken dance lessons as a child – “That’s just how it was back then” – but Ans had never had a dance lesson. “So really we started very late,” says Ans. But they picked it up quickly. At dance school Kuymans in Heerhugowaard they learned ballroom dancing: the quickstep, slow waltz, tango, cha-cha and samba.
Bram: “Back then I was just happy to get one foot in front of the other. Not every step had to be right yet, and I wasn’t thinking about direction or footwork. Making mistakes didn’t matter, we were having fun.”
But the couple soon grew more serious. They took private lessons and entered regional competitions, competing against seven other dance schools – but that competition quickly became too small for them. Ans: “It may sound like bragging, but we won a lot. When we walked in, we’d hear: ‘Here come those Stellings again.’ That’s not nice either.”
Nerves
So it was time for national competitions. The first was in Leidschendam in 1988. Ans couldn’t believe her eyes. “All the women were walking around with hair like this.” She holds her hands well above her head. “Yuck, I didn’t have that. And they all carried a beauty case, which I didn’t have either.”
Bram points the remote at the TV and a video starts. Couples glide elegantly across the floor. The men have paper numbers pinned to their backs, the women wear brightly coloured dresses with feathers along the hem. “A dress like that cost 500 guilders back then,” says Ans. “Nowadays they easily cost 2,000 euros.”
A younger Bram and Ans dance the tango to live music: a small trio from Belgium, organ included. “We kept getting through to the next round as more and more couples dropped out. In the end we came second,” says Bram. “We weren’t so nervous back then either, which is why it went so well.”
Fate strikes
Things were going well for the couple. But then fate struck. In 2003 Bram was head of the technical department in the port of Amsterdam. He had to dismantle the pipework of a large round silo. The 54-year-old climbed a ladder – one without a stabiliser bar. “You really shouldn’t climb one of those, but I did anyway.”
Six metres up, the ladder started to wobble, more and more. Bram grabbed hold of the silo. “I was hanging there, six metres up. It was fall or jump. I had no other choice. I pushed off and jumped.” Bram landed hard on his heels.
In hospital the doctor described Bram’s heel bone as ‘a handful of dog biscuits’. Bram would never dance again, he concluded. Ans snorts. “I thought straight away: then you don’t know Mr Stelling yet.”
Before the accident they trained in England twice a month and competed in all kinds of towns and villages. After the accident everything came to a halt. Bram was in a wheelchair and had to rest. Ans: “But when I came home from the shops, I’d still catch him secretly practising in the living room.”
Ans was proved right. Bram recovered and slowly took up dancing again. But two years after his accident at work, things went wrong once more – this time for Ans. Early one morning she got out of bed. Bram: “She opened the curtains and fell straight backwards. Boom, gone.”
Ans shudders. “I couldn’t see anything, I couldn’t move, but I could hear everything. I just lay there. It was so frightening. I’ve thought back on it often.” It later turned out that Ans had suffered two strokes.
Once again the couple took it easy. But after Ans recovered, their love of dancing started to itch again. “It’s the common thread running through our lives,” says Bram. “It keeps you busy, you have a goal.”
The cost
Over the years Bram and Ans have taken part in all kinds of competitions and championships. One of the highlights was the World Ballroom Dancing Championships in Tilburg in 2015, where they competed in the 60–65 age group. Hundreds of couples competed for the title, and that year Bram and Ans finished second in the world.
In total they have been champions ten times in various age groups – and this year they became Dutch champions in the over-70 category.
Their dancing took them all over Europe, and as far as New Zealand and Japan. None of it was free. Ans laughs: “Our children sometimes say: Mum, this has cost you a house. All that travelling, those private lessons…” “As far as we could, all our income went into dancing,” Bram nods.
And what did they get when they won? Bram laughs. “A bunch of flowers.” Ans: “No, cups. We have more than 400 trophies, and that’s not even counting the medals. Recently I gave a lot of them away to an organisation for people with disabilities who also dance, so they can hand our prizes out to their dancers. But we still have five full boxes in the storeroom.”
Forgetting
After 42 years, Bram and Ans still dance together every day – despite various physical setbacks, or perhaps precisely because of them.
When I’m on the floor, I’m simply nobody. I can forget everything. I have two new knees, I’ve had back surgery, I can’t pass urine on my own so I have to use a catheter. But when I’m on the floor, I forget all of that.
Ans Stelling
Grand Prix Alkmaar
On Saturday 31 October, Bram and Ans dance at the first edition of the Grand Prix van Alkmaar. In the Kees Kist Lounge at the AFAS Stadium, 200 couples from five countries compete for the honours in ballroom and latin. Bram and Ans dance the slow waltz, tango, Viennese waltz, slow foxtrot and quickstep together.
There is also a competition especially for students, the KaasKoppenTrofee, and a Blind Date Cup in which dancers without a partner are paired with another competitor.
The Grand Prix starts at 10:00, with doors opening at 09:00. A spectator ticket costs €12.50 online or €17.50 at the door; competing costs €15.50 online or €20.50 at the door.
This interview by Jana Flekken was published in the Noordhollands Dagblad on 29 October 2026 (translated from Dutch).
