by John Carlin
Where South Africa was sunlit, lush and endlessly varied in vegetation and fauna, animal and human, Iceland’s treeless, monochrome landscape was home to three mammalian life forms: sheep, horses and humans – quite possibly the most ethnically homogeneous humans of any country on earth. In South Africa they had eleven official languages, all ever-shifting, subject to continual cross-pollination. In Iceland they had one language, little changed since the writing of the Norse sagas eight hundred years ago.
Iceland had had a representative parliament in place for a thousand years, South Africa for just twenty. South Africa’s population was 50 million, Iceland’s, 300,000. The gap between rich and poor in South Africa is among the widest in the world. In Iceland the best-off and the least well-off send their children to the same state-run schools and receive the same quality of public health care. Equality among the sexes is such that Iceland is reckoned by the United Nations to be the best country in the world in which to be a woman. In South Africa women and men live in fear of crime and anyone who can afford to live behind a high wall does so. In Iceland, where serious violence is almost unknown, few people bother to lock their houses or their cars. Forty-five people are murdered each day in South Africa; in Iceland the rate is less than one a year.
Possibly the one and only point of contact between Iceland and South Africa was Pistorius. He traveled to the capital, Reykjavik, four times during his athletic career. The manufacturers of his running blades were based there. Össur was the name of the company, the world leaders in prosthetic legs for athletes. They made the Cheetah blades used by the majority of medal-winning Paralympic runners. Össur sponsored Pistorius, supplied him with free blades and customized them to his exacting specifications.
Able-bodied runners have to take good care of their muscles and ligaments; disabled runners have to ensure the mechanics of their artifical extremities are kept finely tuned. When Pistorius ran he was half-man, half-machine. His Cheetahs were to him what the racing car was to a Formula One driver. Made of silicone, carbon-fibre and titanium, the running blades required as much attention to detail as the weight, suspension or wheel alignment of a Ferrari. This was what he worked on with the technical experts at the Reykjavik headquarters of Össur, a multinational enterprise with offices in the United States, Holland, Sweden and China, as well as a factory in Tijuana, Mexico.
The company was founded in 1971 by Össur Kristinsson, a man who, having been born with one leg, set about his work with a determination that went beyond the mere desire for profit. He dedicated most of his energy to resolving the problem, as old as Long John Silver, of how to minimize the friction at the point where the biological leg ended and the artificial one began. What made him happy and rich was hitting upon the idea of cushioning the tube into which the stump was fitted with silicone rolls. In 1999 the company bought out its chief competitors and went global.
One of the companies that Össur bought was Flex-Foot, a company started by an American called Van Phillips, the inventor of the Cheetah. Like Össur Kristinsson, Phillips’s creativity was invigorated by a missing leg, amputated below the knee when he was twenty-one. The revolutionary feature of the J-shaped Flex-Foot Cheetah was that its graphite content provided something all previous prostheses lacked: it absorbed and released energy in a way that translated into a capacity to generate spring. A disabled person using them was able, for the first time, to run and jump.
The intention of Pistorius and other Paralympic athletes who traveled to Reykjavik was to improve their speed by achieving the maximum possible return thrust from each stride. He, the best of them all, was the most demanding of them all, as Össur’s two top technicians attested.
Their names were Lárus Gunnsteinsson, the company’s senior designer, and Christophe Lecomte, a Frenchman who was the head of research and development. ‘I ended up exhausted at the end of each day with him,’ Lecomte said. ‘He made you think hard but also work hard physically, adjusting the screws constantly to get just the right millimetric alignment. But he worked harder still, testing every variant of the blades on the track or on the belt, although the treadmill was not fast enough for him at top speed. He never seemed to more than jog on it. If a screw came off while he was running or something else went wrong he just kept going, testing, running always flat out. Every millisecond mattered for him.’
Often he broke the blades. The Össur boffins had never encountered any other disabled runner who generated such speed or placed so much weight on the ground with each step. But no effort was too great for Össur when dealing with their star athlete and overnight they would build him new ones, resuming testing again the next morning.
Gunnsteinsson said time was never wasted when Pistorius was in town. Together with Lecomte, they would spend every minute of every working day for four or five days anatomizing the technical minutiae of the blades, exploring with limitless patience and persistence every variation that might give him the tiniest of advantages. ‘He was so greedy to run faster, almost boring in his obsessive attention to detail,’ Gunnsteinsson said. ‘He had a huge hunger. More than any other athlete we’ve ever worked with. He was so focused: absolute tunnel vision. You could see this was everything to him. This was his life here.’
So much was it his life, so fully was he in the moment, that he seemed to be oblivious to the pain caused by the shearing motion of the blade sockets on the skin of his stumps, especially his left one. The wizardry of Gerry Versfeld, the doctor who amputated his legs when he was an infant, had turned out to have its limits. The most difficult procedure during the surgery had been to lock the heel pad horizontally onto the bottom of each stump so as to provide him with the natural cushion necessary to ease the pain of placing his weight on them. But as he had grown older, the heel pad under his left stump had gradually shifted sideways, returning back towards the vertical position it had been in when he was born. By this stage of his life he had practically no protection for the bone at the end of the stump, the consequence being that after a hard day’s training the skin had often peeled away, exposing the thin layer of flesh.
‘Our greatest challenge,’ said Gunnsteinsson, ‘is and always has been to find ways to absorb the shock of the impact of the blade on the track so as to try and minimize the pressure on the stumps. But with Pistorius there was only so much you could do. He ran so much and so hard that the sweat poured down his thigh to where the stump meets the prosthesis, which caused skin to chafe. You add to that the fact that he placed an enormous load on that point, seven to eight times his body weight because of the force he applies on the ground; then you factor in that the skin of the stump is not made to take that sort of impact and what it all meant was that at the end of a day’s session his stumps were bleeding, swollen, red and sore. But then the next morning he’d start all over again, at the same rhythm and pace.’
Any ordinary able-bodied athlete suffering injuries on a similar scale would take a rest from training and competiton and wait for the body to heal. In order to try and minimize the consequences of training in an almost permanently injured state, Pistorius made a point of acquiring an unusually detailed understanding of the science of his legs and the mechanics of his running.
‘Most athletes you deal with speak one language, you as the prosthetics engineer speak another and your job is to translate what they are saying,’ Christophe Lecomte said. ‘With Oscar it was different. He understood exactly what we were doing right from when he first came here in 2003. He had an aptitude for it. He got the hang of our language almost immediately.’
Trevor Brauckmann, the specialist who fitted Pistorius’s very first wooden legs when he was fourteen months old, and would sometimes accompany him to Iceland, had another way of making the same point. ‘With the majority of people I treat, communication is not much more sophisticated than between a veterinarian and a horse. With Oscar, it was as if a doctor were talking to a doctor.’
At the Össur headquarters they would carry out tests on him with electronic
sensors, high-speed cameras and a device called an accelerometer, anatomizing the way he ran down to its smallest components. ‘He was highly intelligent,’ said Gunnsteinsson, ‘the one athlete who really understood engineering theory. I think we learnt as much from him as he did from us.’
What Pistorius learnt, he wrote down. He was an obsessive note-taker, chronicling the details of his training sessions, of every race. He would explain why in an interview with the Financial Times: ‘I suppose it’s about control, but about an hour or half an hour after every race, I write down everything about it. What I was thinking, imagining and how I felt. I write down what the weather was like and how training went beforehand. I write down how I got there, including whether the train was late or the traffic was bad. I write down what I ate and how I was feeling and details of any injuries, how much rain there was that day. Every race is won or lost in the head, so you have to get the contents of your head right. Writing things down helps you to control your thoughts.’
Lecomte confessed to being somewhat in awe of Pistorius – because of his furious diligence, but also at ‘a basic primitive level’. ‘He exudes a physical sense of power, quite different from other people. When he had on his blades and wore his Lycra runner’s uniform he was like a large, prowling cat. You felt you were in the presence of a kind of superman,’ Lecomte said. And yet, as Gunnsteinsson remarked, it was easy to forget that when he went to bed at night he took off his artificial legs and was transformed into a less than heroic-looking creature, unable to perform basic tasks without difficulty. ‘You need to pee in the middle of the night and what happens? You either put on your legs or do it in a bottle.’
The two Össur men suspected that he endured as much pain as he enjoyed adulation, but they said he never let them see any evidence of tension between his public and his private self. ‘Other Paralympic athletes we have worked with we have found to be difficult people, angry or arrogant prima donnas, but Oscar, however much stress he was going through in testing, was always respectful, measured and thoughtful,’ said Gunnsteinsson. He and Lecomte were also impressed by the kindness he showed far less accomplished disabled athletes, going out of his way to encourage them and give them tips on how to improve their speeds.
Both he and Gunnsteinsson were prohibited by company rules, they said, to talk about ‘the incident’. But what both did say was that they saw no connection between the man they knew and what happened that night at his home. They were flabbergasted. Just as Dr Gerry Versfeld, the man who had undertaken the first engineering work on his legs, had said, the man who fired that gun was not the man they knew.
There were two other people in Iceland who shared the Össur people’s stupefaction at the news. Like them, they had known him personally. The same could not be said of most of those around the world who shared their belief in his innocence, or at any rate refused to believe he had intentionally killed Reeva.
He had not been completely abandoned by public opinion. Large numbers of his detractors were blindly convinced that he was guilty as charged of premeditated murder. But a rival camp, made up mostly of women, jumped earnestly to his defense, waging propaganda campaigns on his behalf on the internet and sending him letters declaring their unconditional loyalty. They were in no doubt that what had happened at his home on Valentine’s Day was not a ‘killing’, as the press disgracefully insisted on calling it, much less a murder. It was a tragic accident.
They had no more knowledge of the facts than those who vilified him; the view each side chose to take was entirely a matter of faith, obeying an almost religious impulse to clothe the mysteries of life in reassuring certainty. Both camps were notable for their fervor, but those who supported Pistorius were better organized.
Within days of his arrest, previously unheard-of devotees popped up in Europe, North America and Asia, Borneo not excluded. They called themselves the ‘Pistorians’, and initially it was on Twitter that they made their presence felt, denouncing those who called him a criminal. ‘Call me old-fashioned,’ one wrote, ‘but I’d rather my boyfriend didn’t allow a perceived intruder to enter the house unchallenged.’ Comments ranged from the reasonable, ‘I support Oscar because I believe in innocent until proven guilty. I feel for the Steenkamps, losing a child. I don’t attack people. I am a #pistorian and proud to be one!’, to the shrill and accusative, ‘She was a bikini model. “Sex sells”!!! I would be really upset if my daughter posed like that.’
Pro-Pistorius zeal reached such a pitch of anti-Reeva sentiment that a point came when the Pistorius family felt compelled publicly to put some distance between themselves and the more extremist devotees by issuing a statement. It read: ‘The disregard shown by some – specifically those commenting via social media – for the profound pain that Reeva’s family and friends are going through is very troubling.’
Overall, though, the Pistorius family were grateful for the solidarity the Pistorians showed and they agreed with their view that the press were out to get him. This led to a strange contradiction. The Pistorians’ ostensible purpose was to get their message out far and wide, but they refused to talk to reporters. One particularly outspoken Tweeter who went under the alias @LiliTyger, posted, ‘Another “journo” sniffing around wanting to do a piece on us – does she really think we’ll talk to her?’ To which a sister Pistorian added, ‘Every 2-bit freelancer wants to make name for themselves out of this story. Go & do your work and stop bugging people.’
From all this scattered noise various websites bloomed, the most visited of which was one titled ‘Support for Oscar Pistorius’, where bloggers posted mainly in English but also in Spanish, French, Italian, German and Afrikaans. Inspirational quotes popped up there daily, letters written as if to a loved one, poems too. A theological thread ran through many of the bloggers’ epistles, with much mockery of the ‘non-believers’ and invocations made to ‘the Lord’, who was believed to be unambiguously on their idol’s side. A typical extract read, ‘Because what happened is ugly and their hearts are malevolent, they want to strip Oscar of his beauty too, attack him in the darkness while he is unable to defend himself. Another cruel irony, for Oscar has never been a man to curse the darkness. Oscar has always had a wider vision than most of us. He has taught us tolerance and acceptance.’ Pistorius, exemplar and teacher, belonged to the world of light; his enemies, to the infernal shadows.
Mira, a German woman who put up the ‘Support for Oscar’ website and selected its content, underlined the chief article of Pistorian faith. ‘We, the owners of this blog,’ it read, ‘are a group of loyal supporters . . . We have not met Oscar, and it is unlikely that we ever will . . . We do this because we respect and believe in him wholeheartedly.’
The Pistorians did more than believe his version of events. They believed in him, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that the vast majority had never spent any time with him and could not vouch for him as a flesh and blood person. Except, that is, for the two women from Iceland. In December 2013 they sent him a message on the ‘Support for Oscar’ website. Alongside a picture of a little girl and a little boy, the message read, ‘Our dearest Oscar, merry, lovely Christmas to you and your loved ones. Much love.’
Ebba Guðmundsdóttir was the two children’s mother; Sigga Hanna Jóhannesdóttir, Ebba’s mother. Ebba Guðmundsdóttir stood out in a country where women tended to be tall, blonde and blue-eyed. In physical terms, she might have fitted in better in multi-racial South Africa. Her hair was dark brown, her eyes were green, her skin olive-colored, suggesting that there might have been some rare dilution of the Viking Icelandic line somewhere in her family’s past. A writer of books and presenter of TV programs on cooking healthily for children, she brimmed with cheerful energy.
Early in 2005, Ebba, then in her late twenties, became pregnant for the second time. Her first child had been a girl and this one, an early scan revealed, would be a boy. Her husband, Hafthor Haflidason, was thrilled. He was a soccer fanatic who made a living as a players’ agen
t working with the big European leagues. The prospect of having a little boy to kick a ball around with him filled him with delight. He and Ebba could not have been happier. Twenty weeks into the pregnancy, she went to the hospital for another scan.
Sitting eight years later in a café in Reykjavik, a capital with the air of a small fishing town, with little houses whose bright colors stood in contrast to the grey vastness of the North Atlantic, she recalled, in perfect English, what happened next.
‘The radiologist who did the scan suddenly turned pale,’ Ebba said. ‘She looked and looked again at the blurred black and white photograph but struggled to make out the shape of the legs, which she said were in a very strange position. She left the room for a second opinion, looking really worried. I began to cry. When she returned she was almost hysterical. She said parts of the legs seemed to be missing.’
It turned out that neither the radiologist nor the doctor she had stepped out to consult had ever come across anything like this before, not even in medical textbooks.
‘I could only conclude from what she told me that I was carrying a severely disabled child,’ Ebba said. ‘Despair is not the word. It is not strong enough.’ She began to imagine that maybe there was worse news to come, that perhaps the child would be born with mental problems. ‘I went to bed that night sure that my son would be so disabled he would not have a life. I remember thinking I hoped I’d miscarry, that something would happen so my child would just die.’
The next morning she and her husband met with a group of doctors who had been studying the sonogram photo and trawling for information outside Iceland about what condition they might reveal. The problem remained grave, the doctors said, but not as dire as they had initially feared. Everything was as it should be except for one thing. The fibulas were missing from both the foetus’ legs. Their child would be born with a condition never encountered before in Iceland: fibular hemimelia.