Culture
He raped a 12-year-old a decade ago. Now, he’s at the Olympics
Steven van de Velde will step into a picturesque sand court near the base of the Eiffel Tower on Sunday to meet his long-held ambition of becoming an Olympian.
And to let him represent the Netherlands at the Paris Games, the Dutch Olympic Committee agreed that he should stay outside the athletes’ village and not talk with media, who would certainly ask about his prison sentence for raping a 12-year-old girl when he was 19.
Van de Velde, 29, has been competing on the volleyball tour and in international competitions for several years, yet his selection to the Dutch Olympic team has prompted backlash and new attention to his troubling past.
The Dutch Olympic Committee and Dutch Volleyball Federation declined to make Van de Velde available and to comment to The Athletic beyond a statement that said in part that Van de Velde was included on the team “after careful consideration” and that he had “consistently met” their high standards. Van de Velde, approached as he arrived in Paris this week by a reporter from the Daily Mail, declined comment beyond the statements from the federation and committee.
Van de Velde was sentenced to four years in prison in 2016 after admitting that he had taken a cheap flight from Amsterdam to a small airport north of London in 2014 and had sex with a 12-year-old girl after they had talked online frequently for several months.
He was caught after he advised his victim to get a morning-after pill. Staff at a family planning clinic alerted the girl’s family and the police because of her age.
(Pablo Morano/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
Van de Velde served 13 months in prison, including 12 months in Britain before he was transferred to the Netherlands under a treaty between the countries. He was resentenced to a shorter term under Dutch law and was released in early 2017.
After coming out of jail, he gave an interview to Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad in which he said: “I have been branded as a sex monster, as a paedophile. That I am not — really not.”
Van de Velde’s name is still on the UK’s sex offenders registry. Aylesbury Crown Court heard how he started talking to the girl on social media — on Skype, Facebook and Snapchat — and spoke to her almost every day over a few months.
Their communication started when she sent him a friend request. He initially thought she was 16 but even when she told him her real age, he did not break off contact.
On August 2, 2014, he boarded a flight to meet his victim in person. From Luton airport, he took a taxi 22 miles (35km) to Milton Keynes, the town where she lived, for their sexual encounters, including one instance of vaginal sex during which she complained he was hurting her. They also drank Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur together and slept on a cardboard box under a hotel stairway when they couldn’t get a room.
Before he returned to the Netherlands, Van de Velde advised his victim to get the morning-after pill because they had not used contraception.
Back in his home country, Van de Velde’s sporting career was taking off.
He had just won a national championship in 2015 and looked set to make the Dutch team for the following summer’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Then a European warrant was issued for his arrest on child sex charges.
He was extradited to the UK on January 8, 2016, where he pleaded guilty to three counts of raping a child.
In court, his lawyer Linda Strudwick argued that Van de Velde was not a “predatory young man” and that flying to the UK to meet the girl had been a “spur-of-the-moment decision”. She claimed his actions were not grooming and that he did not make the journey “for the purpose of having sex”.
She said: “There was mutual support as two angst-ridden juveniles. He’s lost a stellar sporting career and he’s being branded a rapist. In Holland, the term means violent sexual assault without consent. The headlines say it all — ‘a sex monster.’ It’s plainly a career end for him.”
When Van de Velde was sentenced, it was revealed in court that the victim felt racked with guilt following his arrest and had been self-harming. Judge Francis Sheridan told Van de Velde: “The emotional harm that has been caused to this child is enormous. As she matures, she will have to come to realise that you are not the nice man she thought you were and hoped you might be.”
Under UK law, victims of sexual offences are granted lifelong anonymity, both during the legal process and beyond.
These Olympics will be the peak of Van de Velde’s career (Buda Mendes/Getty Images)
The sentence was reduced in the Netherlands because its law relating to sex with minors is less strict than the law in England.
In a TV interview one year after his release, Van de Velde attributed his crime to being a teenager and “still figuring things out”.
“I made that choice in my life when I wasn’t ready,” he told NOS. “I was sort of lost and now I have so much more life experience.”
He added: “Everyone wants to be liked, everyone wants to be respected, and with something like this on your record, it’s difficult. I can’t reverse it, so I have to carry the consequences. It’s the biggest mistake of my life.”
Since then, he has rebuilt his life and sporting career. He has competed for his country on the international stage since 2017, and in 2022 he married Kim van de Velde, a German beach volleyball player who has also trained as a police officer. They have a two-year-old son.
Marking a career high, Van de Velde will appear at the Paris Olympics alongside his playing partner Matthew Immers, 23, and the pair will hope to build on their recent success where they were runners-up at a tournament on beach volleyball’s world tour in May. Van de Velde has also competed at multiple world and European championships.
Their first group-stage match in Paris is against an Italian duo on Sunday morning.
“I know the Steven of today and I’m happy about that,” Immers said. “I feel comfortable with him, we take good care of each other. I’m 23, he’s 29. He’s a kind of a second father to me, who supports me.”
In its statement, the Dutch Olympic Committee said Van de Velde deserved a second chance as he had shown that he’d “grown and positively changed his life”.
The statement said: “We are deeply aware that the renewed publicity about Steven van de Velde is causing a lot of emotion, which we fully understand, as the events at that time were very serious. A lot has happened since then. Steven served his sentence and has completed an extensive rehabilitation programme with specialised professionals, including the probation service. Experts have concluded there is no risk of recidivism.”
“He is proving to be an exemplary professional and human being and there has been no reason to doubt him since his return,” said Michel Everaert, general director of the Dutch Volleyball Federation.
The volleyball federation added that “when Van de Velde looks in the mirror now, he sees a mature and happy man, married and father of a beautiful son.”
Pieter van den Hoogenband, chef de mission for Dutch Olympic Committee, said the moves to change his accommodations and restrict him from the media were necessary because attention on Van de Velde had magnified around the Paris Games.
“He’s not going to downplay it. We have to respect that and help him as a member of the team to be able to perform,” Van den Hoogenband said.
The IOC does not have its own rules for the selection of individual participants for games, deferring to each national olympic committee to make its own decisions.
“They (the Dutch Olympic Committee) have put out a statement, they’ve made it very clear there’s a lot of safeguarding going on, special extra safeguarding,” IOC spokesman Mark Adams told a news conference in Paris on Saturday.
Some national Olympic officials have made it clear they would not have chosen an athlete to play under similar circumstances.
“If an athlete or a staff member had that conviction, they wouldn’t be allowed to be a member of our team,” said Australia’s chef de mission, Anna Meares.
Van de Velde’s appearance at the Games has prompted fury from campaign groups who said he’d shown a “chilling” lack of remorse and empathy for his victim. A petition with nearly 81,000 signatures called on the IOC to ban known sex offenders from competing.
The Survivors Trust, a UK-based group which supports victims of sexual violence, said in a statement that his inclusion was a “further endorsement of the shocking toleration we have of child sexual abuse.” It added: “The rape of a child was planned, calculated involving international travel, and will undoubtedly cause his victim lifelong trauma, irreversibly changing the course of her life. As a society, we have to start embracing a zero-tolerance approach to this heinous and costly crime.”
“An athlete convicted of child sexual abuse, no matter in what country, should not be awarded the opportunity to compete in the Olympic Games,” added Julie Ann Rivers-Cochran, executive director of The Army of Survivors. “Despite Van de Velde’s justifications, there is no excuse for raping a child. Van de Velde’s statement reveals a lack of remorse and understanding of the consequences of his actions. Raping a minor is not a ‘misstep’ — it is a criminal violation that should exclude people from participation in the Olympic Games.”
When Van de Velde was sentenced in 2016, Judge Sheridan told him: “Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream. Your actions in those two days in England have wrecked your life and you could, had you never come to England and committed these offences, have been a leader in your sport.”
Yet, eight years on, Van de Velde’s dreams are far from shattered.
(Top photo: Lucio Tavora/Xinhua via Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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