Sports medicine can be defined in different ways. In the Netherlands the definition of sports medicine, the field of work in sports medicine, and training in sports medicine have changed several times since specific sports medical activities began in the 1920s. The Olympic games in Amsterdam (1928) saw the beginning of specific preventive activities in sports medicine. Preseasonal screening was established, and after the second world war more than 300 000 preventive preseasonal screenings were performed a year. Another 200 000 children were screened annually by school doctors.

In 1965 the Netherlands Association for Sports Medicine was established. Doctors interested in sports medical problems could attend a specific course. The programme was broad and offered general topics ranging from cardiology to orthopaedic surgery and exercise physiology. The character of the course was a retraining course. Its duration was about 40 hours and it formed the basis for membership of the Netherlands Association for Sports Medicine.

Ten years later the first doctor was fully trained in sports medicine partly modelled on East European standards. This education took four years and consisted of one year clinical …