Amsterdam’s famous g-string roller skater dead at age 66

Amsterdam’s famous g-string skater, Henri Pronker, passed away overnight. He was 66. The man, with his bare butt and tanned legs on top of either rollerblades or -skates, hoped to be remembered as a symbol of freedom, Parool reports.

The g-string skater first showed up in Amsterdam in the late 80s with a blond mop of hair and bare buttocks and quickly became a fixture of the Dutch capital. For decades he stood as a symbol of how you were free to be whoever you wanted in Amsterdam.

He had his heyday in the nineties when he applied advertisements to his thighs “for kicks.” But in an increasingly puritanical Amsterdam, Pronker found more and more hostility in the early 2000s, making him hesitant to skate in the daylight, according to Parool.

Pronker increasingly disappeared from the Amsterdam streets in recent years. First, due to a fall that left his skating less smooth than he liked. And later because he was diagnosed with cancer and eventually became terminally ill.

He once told Parool to let the g-string skater become a mystery, a flash of a skating man that everyone can make their own minds up about. “I belong to the living street furniture of Amsterdam. Who else I am, people can guess.”