In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the crowd heckled and booed from the first moment that Dutch Olympian Steven van de Velde stepped onto the sand. And as the sun set over Paris, fans whistled and celebrated as Van de Velde's team lost in straight sets to undefeated Brazil in a round-of-16 beach volleyball elimination match.
Convicted of raping a 12-year-old schoolgirl in 2016, Van de Velde and his teammate Matthew Immers lost decisively to a Brazilian team that included Evandro Gonçalves de Oliveira, widely considered to be the best server in the world. The lopsided defeat and Van de Velde’s elimination came as a relief to victims’ advocacy groups that wanted the registered UK sex offender banned from the summer games.
Van de Velde, now 29, served 13 months in prison after pleading guilty to three counts of raping a British girl he first met on Facebook. He was 19 at the time that he traveled to England where he raped the underage schoolgirl and he was sentenced to four years in prison.
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Van de Velde served 12 months of his punishment in the UK and was extradited to the Netherlands where he was released after one month because of more lenient underage sex laws.
Upon his release from prison, Van de Velde told a Dutch newspaper: “I have been branded as a sex monster, as a pedophile. That I am not—really not.”
“Everyone wants to be liked, everyone wants to be respected, and with something like this on your record, it’s difficult,” he said in a TV interview. “I can’t reverse it, so I have to carry the consequences. It’s the biggest mistake of my life.”
Throughout the Summer Games in Paris, the Netherlands team stood by Van de Velde while the International Olympic Committee claimed it lacked authority to block the controversial athlete from competing.
On Sunday, after being eliminated from the tournament, Ban de Velde ducked the media. The Dutch team does not allow him to speak with reporters or live in the athletes’ village.
“It was an emotional roller coaster. I see it that way,” his teammate Immers said after the match, according to the Associated Press. “We fought. We enjoyed every moment. So I’m really proud of that. It was the coolest stadium I ever played in... I’m sad that we couldn’t show our level. But everything around it, I enjoyed it.”
“If I can speak for him, after the match we lost, we were disappointed,” Immers said of his teammate Van de Velde. “But we said to each other: ‘Look what we did together. Look how hard we fought with all the attention.’ We stayed together. We cried together off the field and said, ‘OK, let’s just enjoy this moment.’ And we did that. So I’m happy we did it that way.”
Van de Velde and Immers will play together next in the European championships in the Netherlands right after the Olympics, and then the Dutch championships.
“We still got a ninth on our first Olympics,” Immers said. “And I’m proud of that. And we keep on going.”
