The past has a way of catching up with criminals, particularly those whose victims are children. But in the case of beach volleyball star Steven van de Velde, fate has had an odd way of showing it.
The past has a way of catching up with criminals, particularly those whose victims are children. But in the case of Steven van de Velde, fate has had an odd way of showing it.
When he was sentenced the judge said his hopes of representing his country were now ‘a shattered dream’. In 2022, he married a former policewoman from Munster in Germany who is also a professional beach volleyball player. The couple have a two-year-old son. It is an extraordinary situation which, as one British Olympic Committee source put it to me, is ‘impossible to imagine’ happening in the UK.
Later, after he failed to find a hotel room for them, they snuck past the briefly unmanned reception desk of a nearby Premier Inn and made a makeshift bed under a stairwell after finding a cardboard box and pillows. The following day, knowing her mother would be out shopping, the girl invited van de Velde to her house where he had sex with her, stopping when she said he was hurting her. She then performed oral sex on him again.
van de Velde was jailed in March 2016 after pleading guilty at Aylesbury Crown Court to three counts of rape against a 12-year-old British girl In the remarks he made while sentencing then 22-year-old van de Velde to four years in jail, he said: ‘The emotional harm that has been caused to this child is enormous.’‘Prior to coming to this country you were training as a potential Olympian,’ he said. ‘Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream.’
He said that ‘Miss A’ had contacted him first, clicking on a comment he left under a Facebook video and sending a friend request at a time when he was ‘deeply unhappy’ with the strict life he was living at a volleyball training centre. ‘Part of me couldn’t believe this was all real. I decided not to confide in anyone, because I didn’t know myself how it would end and if I would ever be prosecuted.
Indeed, in his native Netherlands, where his past is well-known and apparently tolerated, van de Velde has enjoyed an extraordinary comeback, one which would be unimaginable in the UK. But when Judge Francis Sheridan sentenced van de Velde he gave a clear insight into why English law is as strict as it is.
Amid a growing backlash on social media, domestic abuse campaigner David Challen wrote on X, formerly Twitter: ‘A tale as old as time: rapist with a sporting talent given a free pass so he can continue his professional career.’ Former British Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies MBE, who was just 13 when she was selected to represent Great Britain at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, has also added her voice to the growing furore.
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