There will be no World Championship in Adelaide for van de Velde and teammate Alexander Brouwer. Australia will not let van de Velde in.
We will use all the tools to ensure Australians are and feel safe in their communities, says Interior Minister Tony Bourke according to the Australian ABC.
It was in 2016 that van de Velde, now 31, admitted to three cases of rape against a 12-year-old girl two years earlier. He served 12 months of a four-year prison sentence in England, writes the British BBC.
After the verdict, he has continued his beach volleyball career and is, together with Brouwer, ranked eleventh in the world. In the latest world tour tournament, the duo was eliminated in the quarterfinals.
van de Velde has played both World Championship and Olympic Games. Ahead of the games in Paris, over 90,000 signatures were collected to ban him from the tournament. van de Velde and then-teammate Matthew Immers finished in a shared ninth place.
The World Championship in Adelaide will take place from 14 to 23 November.
