Van de Velde was booed and jeered while competing at the Games. Dutch Olympic officials went to lengths to protect him from the press during the event.
He has now opened up to Dutch publication NOS about his experience, admitting that while he anticipated backlash, the intensity of it took him by surprise. "I definitely had a moment of breaking down, both before the tournament and during it. But I thought ‘I’m not going to give others the power to bully me away or get me away’.
This is a bit of an interesting conundrum …
Granted, I do not know the details of the crime for which he plead guilty and was sentenced. Was it a violent rape? Or was it a concensual get together but she was far to young and he was slapped hard for it? Now I don’t condone it either way but it might give nuance to how he feels about it.
On one side, he, and society overall see it as he served his sentence (not all of it but that is not his fault) and is rehabilitated, he made changes to his life after that and made sure he is not near minors alone again, now even has a family of his own.
But, I really think it’s wrong to think rehabilitation means you can stand on a podium for admiration, or be in a place that strives for excellence in rhe public eye.
This is where he and the people around him should have realized that, no, no matter how good he is in his sport, he should just not be a competitor in the olympics as a shining example of greatness.
Rehabilitation means to be allowed back into society, in a menial job out of view and not in a spotlight of any kind.
It is definitely not a full reset on your life and you can do whatever, thinking people mostly forgot what you did.
So the bullying boo’s are quite justified imo and he should have expected this backlash because he sought the spotlight and admiration for his greatness in sport. And it shows he thought it a deserved thing for his ego following the years of hardship he went through after making a big mistake when he was young.
A 12 (TWELVE) year old cannot consent in the UK. So that’s a strawman argument.
FTFY. It was statutory rape. He groomed a 12 year old, and slept with her multiple times. It wasn’t just a spur of the moment thing; It was planned, and he went out of his way to convince the victim that having sex was her idea.
To clarify: He was sentenced to several years where the crime happened, but was extradited to his home country after only a few months. After extradition, he didn’t serve any time. So he only served a few months total.
He had repeatedly refused to even acknowledge it during the games, and tried to downplay it every single time he was directly asked. Not even so much as a “yeah I messed up but I’m doing my best to make up for it.” Just straight up refusal to engage. Refusing to even admit you messed up doesn’t really tell the public “yes this person has been rehabilitated.” And again, he only served a couple of months for the crime.
The Olympic Games are mostly minors, and most of the athletes live and sleep in close proximity to one another for the duration of the games. The Olympics are also pretty notorious for the massive orgies that happen after hours. They even have special beds (which the athletes always complain about) designed to only hold the weight of one person, because they couldn’t find better ways to stop all the athletes from having hardcore sex parties every night. Almost as if cramming a bunch of the world’s most physically fit teens into a close space and forcing them to sleep in one giant hotel will lead to rampant sex.
He was a 19 year old man in the Netherlands talking to a 12 year old child in the United Kingdom on Facebook. He traveled to see her in the UK, got her drunk, raped her, and then attempted to get a hotel room with her. They couldn’t, so they slept under a stairwell and he raped her twice the next day. She had told him at one point that he was hurting her, but that didn’t stop him. After that, he flew back to the Netherlands and told her to go to a clinic for contraception.
So they were essentially strangers to each other with a significant age gap. I don’t know what her exact intentions were when speaking with him, but she was 12. Even if she were thinking about sex, it would not have been with an understanding of what that actually meant. She wasn’t just under age, she was well under the legal age of consent. There’s a reason that children cannot legally consent to sex.
Also, he’s never really shown any remorse for his actions. At best, he’s said that it was the biggest mistake of his life, but his overall stance seems to be that he regrets getting caught rather than raping a child. He’s much more angry at people calling him a pedophile than he is at himself for doing wrong. So your final points may be true, but they aren’t really relevant to his case because it doesn’t appear that he could be considered rehabilitated. He’s merely completed a prison sentence which was made lighter by Dutch law not classifying his actions as rape at the time.
Thank you for elaborating on the backstory, seems I did not know half of the past of the case.
Tried a short google but there was no old in depth information about the case back then.
All in all it is at least a strange thing that the people around him thought it was a good idea for him to attend the olympics and enabled him to do it.