This Olympic athlete served time for rape of a minor.
The Olympic Games are not just a sporting competition. They are the bearers of certain values, such as friendship, respect and excellence. All athletes and the Olympic Committee must behave irreproachably. However, the Olympic Organising Committee does not require athletes to have a clean record and a sentence, once served, does not prevent qualification for the Games.
This is why Dutchman Steven van de Velde was able to force his way into the Paris 2024 Olympic beach volleyball competition, after serving a sentence for raping a girl who was 12 at the time. At the time, the young man was 19 and had left the Netherlands to meet his victim in the UK, whom he had met on Facebook, and whose age he knew. He had sex, without her mother present, during his trip.
Steven van de Velde, who was a great beach volleyball prospect at the time, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2016 after admitting three counts of child rape. He is also on the UK’s sex offender register for life. He ultimately served only part of his sentence, spending a short year behind bars in the Netherlands thanks to a treaty between the two countries and a reclassification of the offence to fornication instead of rape.
Upon his release from prison, van de Velde immediately expressed his desire to “correct all the absurdities written” about him, as Le Parisien recalls, and worked to avoid being labelled a “sexual monster or a pedophile”. A statement that, at the time, caused consternation. But it is clear that his approach paid off: his past does not prevent him from being selected by his federation for the Olympic Games.
While the judge in charge of the case described his “dream of a shattered Olympics” (“your hopes of representing your country (as an Olympic athlete) are now a shattered dream”, she assured at the time), the Dutchman returned to competition immediately after his sentence and was selected by the Dutch Olympic Committee to participate in the Paris 2024 Olympics from July 26. Ten years after the events, he is ranked 11th in the world in a pair with Matthew Immers. Faced with the controversy, the media outlet The Australian indicates that the Dutch committee could impose a right of veto.