The Dutch athlete won the norm and for now has no intention of retiring from the competition despite his dark past, for which he spent a year in prison. When he was 20 years old (2014), he met a 14-year-old girl who lived in Milton Keynes (England) through Facebook, after which he traveled to her house. When he made sure that there were no other adults nearby, he got drunk and repeatedly raped the child in the house and on the nearby lake. The victim of a Dutch athlete tried to commit suicide several times by inflicting physical injuries and once by taking an excessive amount of medication, and at that time Van de Velde returned to his native Netherlands to avoid justice, but was eventually extradited to Great Britain.