A member of the Netherlands' Olympic beach volleyball team served more than a year in prison for raping a 12-year-old girl in Britain — sparking outrage and demands to belatedly ban him from the Paris Games.
Steven van de Velde, 29, who qualified for the global competition last month, was allowed to represent his country "after an intensive professionally supervised process" of rehabilitation, according to the Dutch Olympic committee.
But his scheduled Sunday debut led the head of Australia's team, former champion cyclist Anna Meares, to say he would have been disqualified Down Under.
"If an athlete or a staff member had that conviction, they wouldn't be allowed to be a member of our team," Meares said this week, according to the Associated Press.
Meares also said that Australia has "a number of athletes under 18 and under 16" and that "policies are well in action for safeguarding of our team."
In a statement issued after he made the Dutch team, van de Velde — who isn't staying in the Olympic village — acknowledged that his criminal past would "attract the attention of the international media."
"I cannot reverse it, so I will have to bear the consequences. It has been the biggest mistake of my life," he said at the time.
The CEO of Rape Crisis England & Wales, Ciara Bergman, has called on the International Olympic Committee to investigate the decision to allow van de Velde to compete.
"Most survivors spend longer on waiting lists for support than this man served in prison. It doesn't add up, and it sends the wrong message," Bergman wrote on social media Saturday.
As of late Saturday afternoon, more than 93,000 people had signed a petition posted on the change.org website to disqualify van de Velde from the Olympics.
In 2016, Van de Velde pleaded guilty to raping the girl in August 2014 following several months of near-daily correspondence on social media after she sent him a friend request, according to the New York Times.
The girl reportedly initially told him she was 16 but he didn't break off contact after finding out her real age.
Van de Velde was charged and extradited from the Netherlands after advising the girl to take a morning-after pill, leading staffers at a family planning clinic to contact her family and the police because of her age.
Van de Velde was sentenced to four years in prison and served a year in Britain before being sent back to the Netherlands under terms of a treaty.
He served another month in prison before being resentenced under a more-lenient Dutch law and released.
In a TV interview one year later, he blamed his crime on being a teenager and "still figuring things out."
"I made that choice in my life when I wasn't ready," he told public broadcaster NOS. "I was sort of lost and now I have so much more life experience."
