PARIS — There is no way to sugarcoat this. On Sunday morning in Paris, a convicted child rapist named Steven van de Velde of the Netherlands played beach volleyball underneath the Eiffel Tower.
He and his teammate, Matthew Immers, lost in three sets to Alex Ranghieri and Adrian Carambula Raurich of Italy amid a few scattered jeers but little else that might have hinted that, a decade ago, when he was 19, Van de Velde raped a 12-year-old girl in England.
He had befriended her online, then boarded a flight from the Netherlands to meet her for a series of sexual encounters in the summer of 2014. In 2016, he was sentenced to four years in prison after admitting to the assaults. He served a year in Britain and then was transferred to the Netherlands, where punishments for such offenses are less severe. He was resentenced to a reduced term, and released in 2017 after serving just 13 months total, plus probation and supervised counseling.
Soon, Van de Velde resumed his pursuit of a career in volleyball, qualifying for his first Olympics earlier this spring. No one — not the Dutch National Olympic Committee, volleyball’s world governing body, the FIVB, or the International Olympic Committee — said he couldn’t play, despite renewed international attention and a petition with more than 80,000 signatures calling on the IOC to prohibit him from playing. And so he did.
“We’re disappointed it’s gotten so big,” Immers said in the mixed zone after the Sunday morning loss.
Van de Velde did not make himself available to journalists. “He wants to rest his mind,” Immers explained.
Sport in general and the Olympics specifically can test the human capacity for cognitive dissonance like few other realms.
Mike Tyson resumed his boxing career after he was convicted of rape in 1992. Kobe Bryant became a beloved athlete once more after acknowledging that a young woman in Colorado did not consider their sexual encounter to be consensual. Cristiano Ronaldo carried on as one of the biggest stars in all of sports after a woman accused him of rape in 2009 (he was never charged and winding civil proceedings were eventually dismissed).
At these Olympics, athletes from Russia and Belarus are competing, despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Some don’t think Israeli athletes should be allowed to compete because of its intense war with Gaza, which began in October after a brutal attack by Hamas near the border. Hamas has received billions of dollars in aid and support from multiple countries with athletes competing in Paris.
The Van de Velde case, though, is something altogether different, immediately testing views about crime, punishment and rehabilitation, including those held by fans who showed up Sunday morning in the trademark brilliant orange of the Dutch.
“It’s a bit weird,” said Bob Groot, who traveled to Paris from Rotterdam to cheer on his countrymen and struggled with how he should support Van de Velde and Immers. “He got sentenced. He did his time, but on the other hand, it’s a difficult thing.”
Others were more charitable, like Janine van Slooten, another Dutch national sporting the brilliant orange.
“He served his punishment,” she said. “People deserve second chances.”
Sports officials in the Netherlands with the country’s Olympic committee made that same determination while also stating that the events “at that time” were very serious. The general director of the Dutch Volleyball Federation, Michel Everaert, has said Van de Velde has become “an exemplary professional and human being” who has learned from his mistakes and used his second chance to evolve.
Van de Velde, who called the assault “the biggest mistake of my life” in a 2017 interview on Dutch television, is now married with a child.
Of course, the woman who was then a girl does not get a second chance to live without what Van de Velde did to her 10 summers ago. Maybe she is unaware that Van de Velde is playing on the sport’s biggest stage, or maybe she turned on a television somewhere and saw nearly 12,000 people waving their arms up and down in unison every time Van de Velde blocked an opponent’s spike attempt, albeit often not with the same enthusiasm as they did for the Italians.
“We got the crowd in our favor,” Italy’s Carambula Raurich said.
How Van de Velde experienced all this remains a mystery, since he chose not to meet with the press, or even walk through the press area, as most Olympians do. Did the pressure of the renewed attention contribute to his missed serves in tight moments of Sunday’s match? Maybe. Or maybe he just missed.
John van Vliet, a spokesman for the Dutch Olympic Committee, said Van de Velde and Olympic officials chose to skip the media availability so as not to “make a fuss.” He is not staying in the Olympic Village either.
Van Vliet said the renewed interest in the case has caught everyone involved somewhat by surprise because Van de Velde has been competing internationally for several years without his criminal past becoming an issue.
“I’m not judging whether it should have been but now, all of a sudden, it’s an issue,” he said.
An issue that Immers was left to address on his own Sunday.
He said he has known Van de Velde for three or four years and played with him the past two. Van de Velde is a good man now, he insisted.
“What is in the past is in the past,” Immers said. “It’s a big example that you can grow.”
Perhaps it is.
It’s also an example of the moral hazards the Olympics often require spectators to wear if they choose to experience them.
As another orange-clad woman in the crowd Sunday who asked not to be identified put it: “We’re only here for the sports.”
(Top photo of Steven van de Velde: Joris Verwijst / BSR Agency / Getty Images)
