ALLEN ABEL: The Olympic reception of child rapist Steven van de Velde

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PARIS — The evil that men do lives after them, wrote Shakespeare, and so on Sunday morning there was some booing – some, but not a crescendo – when the Dutchman took the sand.

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Above was the Eiffel Tower. Ahead was a first-round match in Olympic beach volleyball against two preening Italians. And behind Steven van de Velde of the Netherlands was a horror that will haunt him every time he appears before friends, Romans, and countrymen.

Most Olympian bios say “Enjoys listening to music.” Steven van de Velde’s says “Admitted to three counts of rape.”

It was in 2014 and the Hollander was nineteen, tall, and well-muscled, a rising star in his sport. He had met a British girl on Facebook and things developed digitally as, in the 21st century, these things do. On Skype and Snapchat, they storyboarded a rendezvous at the girl’s home in the city of Milton Keynes.

The girl was twelve years old, and the man from The Hague well knew it.

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“Van de Velde had extensive contact with the victim on social media prior to the offences being committed and was fully aware of her age,” a Detective Constable of the Milton Keynes police stated when the crime came to light.

“During that evening, he gave her alcohol before raping her near Furzton Lake. On the following day he committed further sexual offences against her before leaving for Luton Airport to travel back to the Netherlands,” a local newspaper reported.

Van de Velde turned himself in.

“Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream,” thundered a British judge, imposing a four-year sentence.

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“His career now lies in ruins,” the Bucks Herald predicted.

Van de Velde served twelve months in a British jail and was sent back home to Holland. A month later, he was free.

“I have been branded as a sex monster, as a pedophile. That I am not — really not,” he told the Algemeen Dagblad.

He returned to beach volleyball and a few years later, with a partner named Matthew Immers, rose through the ranks of his countrymen. This year, they qualified for the Olympic Games and the temporary stadium that the Parisians, with their customary éclat, had constructed beneath the Eiffel Tower.

Ninety thousand people signed an online petition to the International Olympic Committee seeking to have van de Velde banned from the competition. There certainly was ample precedent. Boxing champion Mike Tyson had served three years of a six-year sentence for raping an 18-year-old woman in a hotel room in Indianapolis. Ray Rice of the Baltimore Ravens slugged his fiancée in the face in a drunken melée and never played in the National Football League again. Wunderkind shortstop Wander Franco of the Tampa Bay Rays, a married father of two, has been charged with sexual assault against a 14-year-old in the Dominican Republic and hasn’t swung a bat this season.

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The IOC volleyed the potato back to the Dutch; we don’t interfere with individual accreditations, shrugged the sovereigns. (Apartheid South Africa, Talibani Afghanistan, Putin’s Russia, only these fall within their purview.)

The National Olympic Committee of the Netherlands decreed that Steven van de Velde, who now is reported to have a domestic partner and a baby daughter, had fully paid his debt.

And so, Paris.

On Sunday morning, in brilliant sunshine, the temporary stadium beneath the tower was a raucous setting for the Dutchman’s Olympic debut. Van de Velde and Immers would be facing the taunting, flexing, Alex (“Tower of Terror”) Ranghieri and Adrian Ignacio Carambula Raurich, AKA “The World’s Most Entertaining Player,” AKA “Mister Skyball,” the practitioner of a fantastic, impossible, backhanded serve that flies fifty, sixty, seventy metres straight into the sky, daring to be returned.

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During the introductions, supporters of the Italianos in the metal grandstand out-screamed the orange-clad twenty to one. When van de Velde’s name was called, there was enough hooting around the quadrangle to be worthy of reporting, but it was hardly a cauldron of shame.

Coolly, unemotionally, the Dutch held their own on every point.

In the first set, a service ace and a leaping block by van de Velde tied the match at 20, but the Italians scored the next two points.

In the second set, the Dutch came from behind to even the match. But the Italians prevailed, 15-13, in the deciding set and the morning ended with Matthew Immers face down in the dust.

A few minutes later, Steven van de Velde had been led away through a private tunnel and Immers came to the microphones and told us, “He’s not here because he just wants to rest his mind.”

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