by John Carlin
‘It was a total chance occurrence. I just happened to pick up the phone,’ he recalled. ‘There were others working there. I was a junior, just starting out in my first job at a prosthetics consultancy. She described the problem and asked, “Can you help?” I told her to bring the boy in right away.’
A tall, big-shouldered, thick-wristed Afrikaner, Van der Watt had been destined from birth to be a farmer in his home country. Born in 1970, he was raised in the countryside near a town called Bethlehem in the Orange Free State, a landlocked province in the geographical heart of South Africa where apartheid was enforced with special rigor – it was the only region in the country where people of Indian extraction were not allowed to live – during the years when Van der Watt was growing up. Oblivious as most white children – indeed, most white adults – were to the way their darker-skinned compatriots were treated, Van der Watt’s memories of those days centered on life on the family farm, not least his father’s insistence that he get up at dawn to milk the cows. On finishing high school he was sent to study farming in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State. Less wedded to the land than family lore required him, however, he soon found himself taking an interest in the rather unusual subject studied by his college room-mate, orthodontics and prosthetics. To his parents’ dismay, he abandoned farming and left for Pretoria Technikon to acquire a qualification in that field. His success was such that he would end up moving to the United States, to the small town of Winnie, Texas, where he lived with his American wife, two children and two horses, representing a company that manufactured artificial legs. But his first job – ‘sort of part-doctor, part-engineer’ was how he described it – was at the company in Pretoria that Gerti Pistorius phoned on that fateful day.
‘I had a look at his prostheses and saw at once they were beyond repair,’ Van der Watt recalled, sitting in the lounge of his spacious Texas home. ‘They were old-style, 1950s, wooden, and they were an ungainly mess.’
He decided he should find a set of new, improved prosthetics for the boy which would allow him to run and play. ‘He was shy,’ Van der Watt recalled, ‘but as I would soon discover he really pushed himself to the limit.’ They had several sessions together until they found exactly the right fit. Along the way, Van der Watt had a brainwave.
‘It was the year 2000, just before the summer Olympics and Paralympics. I was intrigued by this Paralympics thing and I got hold of a promotional video for the games, with music and stuff. I thought Oscar should take a look at it. He had no idea Paralympic sport existed and he sat there watching the video in my office, absolutely absorbed. He was smiling and I could sense a tingle in him. Watching that video sparked new dreams in the boy.’
What he needed now was a pair of carbon-fiber ‘Cheetah’ blades like the ones the Paralympic runners used. The originals were far too expensive and so Van der Watt, inspired by the boy’s zeal, decided to try and build a pair of his own. What he lacked was the knowledge required to work with carbon fiber and to mould the blades to the correct specifications. So he made contact with a man who worked with that very material in the manufacture of airplanes and drew for him on a piece of paper a model of what he wanted, based on the Paralympians’ Cheetahs, which had originally been inspired by the shape of the legs of the animal itself.
‘The airplane guy made the legs, I built the sockets into which Oscar would lock his stumps, I attached the two and we made a plan,’ said Van der Watt, who took a photograph of the fourteen-year-old on the very first day he tried them on. He looked proud as could be. The problem, they would soon find, was that they would have to make not just one pair, but several.
‘We went to the track thinking, let’s see what happens. Then he ran and broke the first pair in five minutes. I probably made five or six pairs until he stopped breaking them.’
His stumps bled, raw from the friction between the makeshift blades and the thin skin, as he pounded up and down the track. But he never gave up.
His persistence drove Van der Watt on. Man and boy were on a mission – almost a secret mission, for, while Pistorius’s mother knew and was immensely grateful to Van der Watt, the school had no knowledge of what they were scheming. Pretoria Boys had its own athletics track, but they conducted their experiments elsewhere. For Van der Watt the frustration of seeing pairs of blades that he had laboriously built break one after another was compensated for by the specialized knowledge he was developing about the mechanics of how they worked – sufficient knowledge for him to be recruited, a decade later, as technical adviser to the US Paralympic team.
The two critical elements in the development of an effective prosthetic blade were, first, the comfort of the socket into which the stumps fitted. ‘Think of a shoe,’ said Van der Watt, echoing Sheila Pistorius’s admonition to her son as he prepared for school in the mornings. ‘Think a snug fit, not too loose, not too tight, but just right.’ Second, there was the alignment of the base of the blade, identifying exactly the correct angle for it to face, exactly where the maximum downward weight of the body would fall so as to exert optimum forward propulsion, maximizing use of the body’s energy. In addition to that, Van der Watt explained, it was important to get the weight and length of the blades just right, each in proportion to the runner’s strength and size.
But comfort was the key to everything, he said. ‘When you’re running you are hitting the ground with two and a half or three times your body weight. You measure that by the force applied on the ground, which bounces back as force on the limb, which then generates the forward running propulsion. If the fit of the prostheses is too loose or too tight, you lose speed and you gain pain.’
It was not until 2001 that they hit upon a pair that did not break and with which the boy was entirely comfortable. He was still playing rugby at school, using his normal everyday prostheses, but every other week he would go to a track to experiment with the home-made Cheetahs. At that stage, fourteen going on fifteen, his goal was not the Paralympics. Van der Watt could see he was fast, but he did not know how fast relative to potential competitors at the highest level of disabled sports. ‘To me he was just a kid, shy but a bit of a joker, who laughed a lot, played pranks, put staples into his legs to freak out people who did not know he wore prosthetics,’ Van der Watt said. ‘I was just doing my job for a nice Pretoria kid, with no plan or bigger goals. I was just helping the kid have a good life.’
He loved running on the blades but his chief obsession remained rugby, the sport you had to play at Pretoria Boys to impress your peers. But something had to give, and it did one day when he was playing against another school soon after he had turned sixteen. Two huge boys on the rival team tackled him at the same time. His artificial legs went flying, but he also hurt his knees badly. As he lay on the ground, a spectator goaded him, barking at him to get up and stop behaving like a girl. He did, and played the rest of the game, but after it was over the truth finally began to sink in that his future might not lie in rugby.
He went to see his trusted doctor, Gerry Versfeld, who prescribed a detailed three-month programme of rehabilitation, the last phase of which involved doing a lot of sprinting to build up the damaged knee. At the start of 2004 he began training at the University of Pretoria with an athletics coach by the name of Ampie Louw.
Louw was a big, bluff Afrikaner, then in his mid-forties, who would make it his chief task over the next ten years to help Pistorius make all the tiny, finely calibrated adjustments necessary to squeeze every possible millisecond out of his natural speed. The fruits of the new training became manifest within a month of the two starting out together, at the end of January 2004, when Pistorius found himself representing Pretoria Boys at a schools athletics event in Bloemfontein.
It was with a mixture of curiosity, bafflement and sniggers among the boys of the rival teams that he appeared on the track for the start of the 100 meters. The general supposition was that Pretoria Boys had chosen him for their team out of kindness. No one expected him to finish anything but l
ast. But he won, the cheers he received providing him with his first intoxicating taste of public glory. More was soon to come.
The final event of the day was the 4 × 100 meters relay. If Pretoria Boys won, they would lifted the schools trophy. Paul Anthony was not there. He was away with his wife on vacation. But he received a running commentary on the phone from a teacher who was present. ‘We were fourth of fifth going into the last, then Oscar got the baton,’ Anthony recalled. ‘Suddenly my colleague cried out, “Jesus Christ, he’s flying!” And, boy, did he! He tore through the rest of the field and he crossed the tape first. We were champions!
‘I put down the phone in utter disbelief and I told my wife, “I knew he was quick, but I had no idea how quick. It’s unbelievable. It’s a fairy tale. Someone has to write about this kid.” I mean, my colleague was right: the boy with no legs, he could fly!’
Everything happened extraordinarily fast from that day on. It turned out that the time in which he won the 100 meters, 11.72 seconds, beat the world Paralympic record for double, or ‘bilateral’, amputees. By nearly half a second.
Rugby was forgotten. The best he could ever hope for in that sport was to be a moderately good representative of his school, and never at the highest level. Throwing himself into running, he found the refuge he craved from the pain of his mother’s death, but also a pursuit that turned out to be ideally suited to his temperament. To succeed as a runner he needed to depend on no one and nothing but himself. The more he pushed himself to the limits his unlikely talent would allow, the faster he would go. Here, at last, he was the master of his own fate, able to a degree his mother could not have dared imagine not only to disguise his vulnerability from the world, but to shine bright.
Still only seventeen, with a year and a half of secondary school to complete, he competed in the South African disabled games and, although initially perplexed at finding himself in the company of disabled people, a group to which he had been conditioned to imagine he did not belong, he instantly achieved the qualifying time to represent his country in the 2004 Athens Paralympic Games. Suddenly he was all over the news, he did a TV advertisement, he started receiving sponsorship money, he bought his first car and discovered his love of speed on the road – another pursuit where, regardless of his legless condition, he felt in complete control.
In June, three months before the Athens Games, he contacted Francois van der Watt, who had just moved to the US.
‘ “I am in the South African team. I need new legs,” were his words to me,’ Van der Watt recalled. ‘So I told him to fly over. He did, I measured him, made the socket, got the alignment right and there he was, with his first Cheetahs. They took him to the next level.’
The Flex-Foot Cheetah had been the Paralympic athlete’s brand of choice since the early 1990s, and the one Pistorius would use for the rest of his career. The first time he tried them out competitively was in Oklahoma, where Van der Watt took him to take part in the Endeavor Games for disabled runners. He ran in the 200 meters against the fastest men in the US, and won. The local press were all over him. It was the first time he’d made the news outside South Africa.
‘We shared a room in Oklahoma City,’ Van der Watt said, ‘and what struck me was how focused Oscar was, how determined to do his absolute best. He did not seem overawed at all at the prospect of his first big race outside South Africa. Then I saw how he ran, and how well he handled himself in public with the press, and I knew, right there, what I had always suspected but had not dared fully imagine before. He had enormous potential. He was going to be big.’
How would he do in Athens, though, in a giant stadium before a large crowd? All he had was eight months’ athletics experience behind him. He would be competing against veterans, a number of them single-leg amputees, who were five or ten years older than he was. Also, Louw had identified a critical weakness in his technique. He was not fast off the starting blocks – not fast enough to win the 100 meters at this level. Having failed as yet to master the art of the sprinter’s classic, crouching start, down on one knee, he lost explosivity by using a standing start, as long distance runners did. In the 100 meters he would be giving too much of an early advantage to his rivals to have any hope of winning. He took part in the race anyway, but Louw judged that the best bet at this stage of his career was the 200 meters, where he would have more time to make up ground lost at the start.
Dr Gerry Versfeld flew to Athens to see him run. Familiar as Dr Versfeld was with being in the company of amputees, he was astonished at the spectacle of so many lean, fit sportsmen and women with missing limbs. ‘It was a big eye opener, even for me. It was the first time I saw people with disabilities do such things,’ Dr Versfeld said. ‘The message, loud and clear, was: these are not crocks, these are people with talent and part of our society.’
It was another doctor who, more than half a century earlier, had hit upon the idea of engaging disabled people in competitive sports. The doctor’s name was Ludwig Guttmann, a German Jew who had fled to England early in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution. A brilliant neurosurgeon, Guttmann treated soldiers with spinal cord injuries after the end of the Second World War at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, near London. One day it struck him that a good way to lift his patients’ morale would be to persuade them to take part in organized sports. In 1948, on the very same day that the summer Olympic Games began in London, Guttmann launched what became known as the Stoke Mandeville Games. This led twelve years later, in Rome, to the first official Paralympic Games.
Pistorius would become the most celebrated beneficiary of Guttmann’s generous legacy. At the Athens Games of 2004, while still only seventeen, he stole the show. ‘His only problem was getting going,’ Dr Versfeld recalled, ‘but he still managed to get bronze in the 100 meters. Then, in the 200 meters, he also got off to a bad start and was ten meters behind in no time, with four or five other runners ahead of him after the gun went off. But then he built up the most amazing head of steam. He wobbles a bit from side to side when you look at him from the front, but from the side, which was my vantage point, he was poetry in motion. It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I was immensely proud.’
He was the youngest runner in the field, but he won the race and, with a time of 21.97 seconds, set a new world record.
Bill Schroder, his headmaster, was thrilled. Pistorius’s triumph was the school’s triumph too. But he was also concerned. ‘He lost his mother at a very, very impressionable age and then, overnight, he was catapulted into iconic wonderkid national status. He was only seventeen and he was being feted in the newspapers, sought out for interviews by women’s magazines. Any boy would become impossible in such circumstances at that age, but then he had no mother. His father, Henke, only started taking an interest in him for the first time that I ever saw after he became famous. Plus he had no legs. I was exceptionally worried about how he’d cope, all the more so as I realized that we in the school were the only ones who might be able to give him his bearings.’
Schroder determined that what he should not do was allow him special treatment. Pistorius thought he deserved it. Suddenly a celebrity inside and outside the school, he was becoming a law unto himself. But Schroder was the law at Pretoria Boys. Inevitably, during his final year at school, after Athens, the two clashed. First, over a sponsored car that Pistorius had received. Schroder ordered him to get rid of it. Pistorius protested at first but then grudgingly acquiesced.
The second time, he informed Schroder that he had to take time off from school to take part in an athletics competition in Finland. Schroder told him he was not going. He replied that he had to, it was an opportunity that might never be repeated to take part, not in a Paralympic event, but in an international able-bodied athletics meeting. The exchange became heated, as Schroder recalled. ‘He said, “I must go.” I said, if you go, you’re not coming back. I told him he had to do all the things the others did, with no special privileges, by tradition of the school. I won and he stayed. But he was en
raged with me, I know. I heard that he began speaking of me to people as “Mr Fucking Schroder”.’
Apart from the principle, there was a practical reason why Schroder did not want to let him take time off from school. He had a duty to discharge as a dormitory prefect. In a room full of junior children he was the one in charge, his job to double up as mentor and enforcer of discipline. Within the confines of that room he had practically the same measure of authority as Schroder had over the whole school. The difference was that he was only eighteen and there was a risk that he, as anyone else that age might have done, would abuse his power.
After he shot Reeva Steenkamp some said that he had. Word spread among those who chose to believe that he had killed her deliberately that at school, in his capacity as dormitory prefect, he had been a violent bully.
How seriously the accusation was taken depended on whether it was measured by the standards of urban middle-class cohabitation or by the higher threshold of rough behavior tolerated within the walls of Pretoria Boys High. Rumors did reach some teachers that he had a violent temper – that sometimes he ‘flipped’, as one of them put it – and that he threatened the younger boys. But that was hardly news at Pretoria Boys. Others who had been students there reported that their first years had been ‘sheer terror’, that the prefects to whom they reported were supposed to play a supportive role but in practice used the younger boys to polish their shoes, to clean their bedrooms, and did not hesitate to punish them if they deemed they had broken a school rule. As one former pupil said, ‘You were in constant fear of transgressing the norms; you were the slave class of the boarding and house systems.’
Heavy-handedness was the norm. Bullying went with the territory, and for boarders it was especially tough. It was boot camp, as former students would say, an excellent preparation for military life. Prefects were sergeant majors with license to subject their subordinates to all manner of indignities, not excluding physical violence to a degree that might be judged illegal in civil society. What was considered unpardonable among the boys was to go and tell the teachers when someone had done something to you that you did not like. But while the boarders never ‘sneaked’ when they were at school, during the vacations some did confide in their parents. Some of them talked about the boy with no legs.