Steven van de Velde episode leaves no winners on dark day for Paris Olympics
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Second chances are all around here at the Olympics in a city getting its third opportunity to welcome the world.
Sha’Carri Richardson is being guided by Dennis Mitchell, who served a two-year doping ban as an athlete and then was recorded offering to supply testosterone and human growth hormone to those he later mentored. Last year he was named USA Athletics coach of the year.
Mitchell has been drinking in his sport’s last chance saloon for so long he can barely stand up but here he is, with his access-all-areas pass and another moment in the spotlight.
And he is not alone, there are too many athletes to list in Paris who are back competing after an enforced spell on the sidelines.
Grave error of judgment – the unofficial motto of the last few days – should not necessarily be career-ending for athletes, such as Charlotte Dujardin, who pulled out of the Games after a video emerged of her “excessively” whipping a horse.
Missteps, mistakes, and lessons learned the hard way are part of sport’s constant quest for that perfect redemption arc.
But for some things so heinous there is no equivalence, no neat comparison for the sake of consistency, sometimes one rule for them and one for another is an inelegant but ideal solution. There is no straight line between doping and child abuse.
Dutch beach volleyball Steven van de Velde made his Olympic debut on Sunday under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, almost a decade to the day after he pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year year-old British girl when he was 19.
After a week of leaden skies and incessant rain, the sun came out in Paris on Sunday, but this was a dark morning in the history of these Games.
There were some jeers and some boos as he was introduced to the crowd, alongside partner Matthew Immers, for their first-round match against Italy’s Alex Ranghieri and Adrian Carambula. However, if you were expecting a cacophony of condemnation, you got off at the wrong Metro stop.
But you don’t come to the beach volleyball to stage a protest – especially when the seats cost up to £300 – and the isolated pockets of disapproval were soon replaced by Mexican waves and a pumping dance track, enjoyed by giddy fans in swaying stands. If this was a sombre moment for sport, someone forgot to tell the DJ.
“We talked about it one time and we want to enjoy every moment on this stage because we gave everything together for the past three years to qualify,” said Immers.
“Steven is a really nice guy and for me, I played two years with him, there was nothing and now there is some people that don’t like it because it is a big tournament.”
The International Olympic Committee’s moral authority expired many Games ago, the truth being you can’t stage an event of this ambition and scale, with the commercial billions needed to support it, just by preaching about the power of sport and asking for peace. The IOC doesn’t do politics but it’s hard to think of a place more political.
Take a tour of their £155m headquarters, perched overlooking a Swiss lake in Lucerne, and you’ll bump into more lawyers than you would in the White House. This is a place of legalities and regulations, where despots and dictators are glad-handed, while a French chanteuse sings the words to Imagine.
Olympic diplomacy requires you to deftly dance on a pinhead in hobnail boots, which is perhaps why their long-serving president Thomas Bach – a fencer turned lawyer turned administrator – is a man known for having a foot in three camps.
Friends say that Bach thinks five moves ahead, a key skill in a role that requires top-level diplomatic street smarts, while a small but growing number of detractors dismiss him as a monotone and increasingly tin-eared autocrat.
When elected 11 years ago, he highlighted a ‘sea of troubles’ for the Olympic movement, Bach is not a man prone to exaggeration, but he may have been underselling it.
The 70-year-old German does not boast the flair – or menace – of Juan Antonio Samaranch, who professionalised and commercialised the Games for two decades before the turn of the century.
But he has built such an unwavering powerbase that allies and foes agree he has become perhaps the most influential president in the history of the Olympics. There was simply never a chance Bach would intervene to prevent Van de Velde competing here.
Every Olympic athlete must come through an area known as the ‘mixed zone’ when they finish their events, where media wait to ask them questions, but Van de Velde has been given special dispensation not to speak.
He is not staying in the Olympic Village with his team-mates and received a special security escort when he arrived in Paris on the Eurostar from Amsterdam.
The Dutch Volleyball Federation, who selected him, and Netherlands Olympic Committee, who endorsed that decision, emerge from this with zero credit, the biggest newspaper in the country published an editorial headlined ‘Don’t turn an ex-sex offender into an Olympic pariah’.
The IOC insist there is nothing they can do to interfere with a selection decision of a member association, while bringing down a clunking legal fist on anyone who posts Olympic footage on social media.
There are no winners in this tale, apart from Ranghieri and Carambula, who beat Van de Velde and partner 22-20, 19, 21, 15-13, but the biggest loser is the victim.
We’ve heard plenty of opinions about Van de Velde but only theirs really matters.