Crowd Cheers as Convicted Rapist is Eliminated in Olympic Beach Volleyball

In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, the crowd heckled and booed from the first moment that Dutch Olympian Steven va de Velde stepped onto the sand. And as the sun set, fans whistled and celebrated as the Netherlands team lost 2-0 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 to meet the underage schoolgirl and he was sentenced to four years in prison.

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.”