In 2016, Steven van de Velde pleaded guilty to three counts of raping a 12-year British schoolgirl. On Sunday, the registered sex offender was knocked out of the Paris Olympics.
I totally agree with you and fuck this guy, but there is some context to his sentence here in the Netherlands:
One legal distinction is that Van de Velde is unlikely to have been convicted of rape had he stood trial in the Netherlands rather than England. In England, sex with a 12-year-old is rape, regardless of the circumstances: an under-16 cannot legally consent. But after he was extradited to the Netherlands, having serving almost a year of his prison sentence, he was released after less than a month. Under Dutch law, his crime was deemed to be the lesser offence of ontucht, sexual acts that violate social-ethical norms.
Oh I know. It's disgusting, but it's the law and you can't retroactively change it. But they could, at the very least, not let the fucker on their Olympics team.
You, like most people in this thread, are confusing support for a person with support for a form of punishment which is humanitarian and rehabilitative, rather than vengeful and punitive.
Someone in another thread showed a deleted Instagram post, but I can't find it now. I suppose it could have been a photoshop or something. Also, I don't speak Dutch so I could only approximate that's what it said. Anyway, the rest is definitely true.
The times article said he was very transparent and remorseful though. I find it really bad that you people think a country would be so desperate as to let a criminal off the hook just because he's good at some sport, it's not like he's a powerful politician or something.