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’.
Why are you defending a pedophile so hard in this thread?? He didn’t even serve his full sentence since he was pulled out of the UK early. What we want from him is an apology for what he did, but it doesn’t look like we will ever get that since he is now playing victim as the rapist. Maybe if he actually served his full sentence things would be a little different, but he got a small slap on the wrist for one of the worst crimes someone can commit. He should never have been sent to the Olympics as a representative of the Netherlands.