Dutch volleyball player convicted of rape British girl stays away from Olympic Village

A Dutch volleyball player is allowed to take part in the Olympic Games despite raping a 12-year-old British girl. However, she will not be allowed to take part in the athletes’ village in Paris.

Steven van de Velde, who was sentenced to four years in prison in 2016, is said to have sought alternative accommodation during the Games in order to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

Despite his criminal record in the UK, Van de Velde came to Paris with the “full support” of the Dutch Volleyball Association.

German news agency Bild was the first to report that his absence from the village was against sporting tradition. However, his partner in the beach volleyball team, Matthew Immers, is expected to stay in the village and handle the media after the Games.

Van de Velde qualified for the Olympics, which begin next week, eight years after a judge told him his hopes of representing the Netherlands were a “shattered dream”.

In March 2016, he confessed to three counts of rape of a child he met on Facebook. He had flown from the Netherlands to the UK to meet his victim in August 2014, when he was 19.

Judge Francis Sheridan told him: “Before you came to this country, you trained as a potential Olympian. Your hopes of representing your country are now like a shattered dream.”

However, Van de Velde, who had spent just 12 months in a Dutch prison, was allowed to resume his Olympic career and last month he secured a place in the national duo alongside Immers at the Paris Olympics.

When he was sentenced at Aylesbury Crown Court after being extradited from his homeland, his own lawyer Linda Strudwick said of the verdict: “All the headlines say it: ‘A sex monster.’ This is clearly the end of his career.”

On the contrary, Van de Velde, now 29, has earned his spurs in beach volleyball so well that he and Immers are now ranked eleventh in the world rankings.

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