Dutch volleyball player convicted of child rape and booed during first Olympic Games

Dutch beach volleyball player Steven van de Velde was not given a warm welcome when he stepped onto the court for the first time at the Paris Olympic Games on Sunday.

In a pre-match video, the convicted child molester was greeted with loud boos and scattered applause as he and his Dutch teammate Matthew Immers were introduced ahead of the match against Italy.

However, the pair lost. Van de Velde’s next match is against Chile on Wednesday.

Even before the start of the Paris Games, there was controversy over the Netherlands’ decision to include van de Velde in their Olympic team.

The sportsman was sentenced to four years in prison in 2016 after admitting to raping a 12-year-old British girl he was planning to meet on a trip from Amsterdam to England when he was 19.

He was caught when the minor tried to obtain the morning-after pill, after which the health clinic alerted her family and the authorities.

Van de Velde ultimately served only 13 months of his sentence before being released in 2017. His name is still on the UK sex offenders’ register.

Despite calls to remove the athlete from the team, the Dutch Olympic Committee defended its decision to allow van de Velde to play, saying in a statement that “a lot has happened” since the attack in 2016 and that he has “grown and made positive changes in his life,” according to The Athletic.

“We are deeply aware that the renewed publicity of the Steven van de Velde case is causing a lot of emotions, which we fully understand given that the events at the time were very serious,” the statement said.

However, the committee agreed to ban him from staying in the Olympic Village with other athletes.

Van de Velde refused to speak to the media during his time in Paris, but appeared to downplay his actions in interviews after his release from prison.

“I was branded a sex monster, a pedophile,” he told the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad in 2017, according to The Athletic. “I’m not that – really not.”

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