by John Carlin
Her use of that final ‘from’ allowed for two interpretations. What she meant, it appeared, was that he of all people should protect her against the attacks of ‘outsiders’. What the prosecution could construe the phrase as meaning was that she felt she needed protection from his attacks. They might also try to make something of that passage where she said ‘I’m scared of u sometimes and how u snap at me’. But Reeva had immediately followed that up by saying he made her happy ‘90 % of the time’. And the truth, later to be confirmed in court, was that more than 90 per cent of the messages they exchanged had expressed loving affection. Pistorius wanted to believe that, when the time came, his lawyers could demolish any prosecution attempt to divine a motive for his having wished to kill her from the contents of the iPhone messages.
Nevertheless, to have to endure the embarrassment of hearing those intimate exchanges read out in court when they were only ever intended to be read by two people, to see them blazed across the pages of the world’s press, was yet another of the humiliations that awaited him when the murder trial began. Once more, he would be pilloried and laughed at. Reeva’s words in that one fraught exchange would be analyzed at length. She was the one who would come across as the grown-up in the relationship, he as the petulant child.
But what his detractors were likely to ignore was how fleeting and atypical, as he chose to see it, that row had been; a day or two later they’d made up and had started planning trips abroad together. Whether the relationship would have withstood extended exposure to her need for independence and his insecurities was another matter. But to preserve what was left of his mental health as he waited for the murder trial he needed to believe that they had been heading for marriage; he needed to nurture his faith in their love as much as he did his faith in God. It had not been just about her beauty, he had convinced himself – nor that by having her as an appendage he was able to embellish the image he sought to present to the world of himself as a manly conqueror. It had not been a mere exercise in shoring up his frail vanity. She was more than a trophy. They had a lot in common. They were both quick-minded and curious about what happened in their country, politically and socially. She had a law degree and he had never finished university, but that did not intimidate him. When she negotiated her modeling contracts she sought his advice and found it helpful, for he was a more shrewd and experienced bargainer than she was.
But at least as important as all that, in terms of his future with Reeva, was their shared religious practice and belief in God. They were both church-going Christians who loved listening to Hillsong Church music on the car radio. Neither of them saw a contradiction between seeking earthly pleasures and prostrating themselves humbly before the Lord. They were bonded by mutual affection and the pursuit of glamor, money, luxury cars, sex and – simultaneously – Christ’s redemptive love. Pistorius convinced himself he would find no other woman who combined the worldly attributes he sought with a habit of Sunday church-going and praying together, heads bowed and hands entwined, before each meal. Who else would pray for him every night before going to bed, as Reeva said she did? He loved her because she was beautiful and because she was devout. Just like his mother.
10
This is the sublime and refined point of felicity, called the possession of being well deceived.
JONATHAN SWIFT, TALE OF A TUB
IF WINNING the heart of Reeva Steenkamp proved Pistorius’s worth to himself as a man, competing against the best able-bodied runners was the challenge he sought to prove himself as a runner. Long before meeting her, barely three years into his running career, he had already conquered the double-amputee world records at 100, 200 and 400 meters. Guided in all things by his mother’s admonition that the real loser was the one who was too afraid to compete, he resolved to demonstrate that he could go stride for stride against the world’s fastest men and fulfill his greatest dream – to run in the Olympic Games.
In July 2007 he made an audacious move in that direction. He decided to take part in a 400 meters race in Sheffield, England, against a top-class field which included the reigning Olympic champion. Having recently come second at that distance in the South African national championships, Pistorius did not harbor any expectation of winning, but he did hope he would acquit himself well enough to be invited to participate in able-bodied races on a consistent basis.
The event in Sheffield was part of the Grand Prix circuit endorsed by the sport’s controlling world body, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). The stadium would be packed and all eyes would be on the Blade Runner. From the moment he got up in the morning, his eyes were on the sky. It was a midsummer day, but it was pouring with rain. Officials at the IAAF had been asking in previous months whether running with his Cheetah prosthetic blades would give him an unfair advantage, with some debating whether he should be banned from participating in able-bodied competition altogether. What Pistorius knew, though, was that wearing blades in wet, slippery conditions was indisputably a disadvantage. The irony of his predicament was that, in the event of him beating most of the competition, the arguments of those against him being allowed to continue to compete in IAAF races would be reinforced. Performing poorly might not do him any harm in the long run. But his competitive pride would not allow him to consider that possibility. He was ‘a fearsome competitor’, as one of his admiring rivals said before the race, and for that very reason the blow to his pride were he to disgrace himself would hurt all the more.
Fearing the worst, Pistorius spent the hours prior to the race looking out of the window of his hotel bedroom, hoping for a break in the clouds. But the rain continued to bucket down. Receiving the biggest cheer of the day when he took his place on the starting blocks did little to raise his spirits. The track was sodden but the stakes were high – it was entirely probable that he was going to make a fool of himself. He did, coming last by a good distance. More bad news followed. Pistorius learned just after the race was over that he had been disqualified for straying out of his lane. He was miserable, and he showed it during a tetchy exchange with journalists who, in what he took to be a maliciously mocking spirit, insisted on asking him whether to run with Cheetahs was cheating. His answer, delivered gruffly, was, ‘I am innocent until proven guilty, not the other way round.’
A month later he had a chance to redeem himself at the Olympic Stadium in Rome in another 400 meters IAAF race against elite competition. This time the sun shone and the grip of his blades on the track was good. He was last coming into the final 70 meters, but then he powered through the field to finish second. Sheffield had been a fiasco, but Rome was his most satisfying triumph to date. The bad news was that he had done too well, causing alarm bells to ring at the IAAF. The fact that he had recorded a faster time in the second half of the race than the first, which happens rarely in a 400 meter race, served to intensify suspicions among those who ran the sport that there was something not quite right here. Was he a ‘bionic’ man running against ordinary men? Did his mechanical appendages violate the spirit of fair play? They decided to investigate.
After studying a videotape of his race in Rome, the IAAF’s scientific advisers recommended that Pistorius undergo tests at the German Sport University in Cologne. Over two days, infra-red sensors, oxygen masks and all manner of sophisticated video equipment were used to measure his lung capacity, study his blades, and compare the return energy generated by the artificial legs when they hit the track with that from a runner with ordinary human legs. The scientist supervising the tests, Dr Peter Brüggemann, concluded that Pistorius used 25 per cent less energy and consumed fewer calories than able-bodied athletes running at similar speeds over the same distance. Invoking a rule that prohibited the use of ‘any technical device that incorporates springs, wheels or any other element that provides a user with an advantage over another athlete not using such a device’, the IAAF declared that the Cheetah blades fell into this category and formally banned him from participating in able-bodied competition
s. The announcement was made on January 14, 2008.
Pistorius, now twenty-one, should not have been surprised, but he was. People close to him reported that he was in shock. Not only was the ban the biggest setback of his career so far, killing his dream of competing in the Olympics, it drew a clear dividing line between him and runners with intact limbs, denying him the possibility of showing the world what he had always sought to show the people around him: that his disability was a misnomer, that there was no obstacle to him leading as full a life as anybody else. But he refused to be dispirited. He had overcome every obstacle in the way of his running career and he would overcome this one, too. He would appeal against the ban and win. Yet he had little idea how to go about it. Luckily for him, someone he had never heard of, a Milanese lawyer called Marco Consonni, took an interest in his case.
Consonni worked for the Italian branch of a New York legal firm called Dewey and Leboeuf. In the second half of January 2008, he and his American colleagues had a discussion about how to expand the firm’s business globally. He proposed that they get involved with the case of an athlete called Oscar Pistorius, whom he had read about and who, Consonni supposed, would need legal assistance to overturn the IAAF ruling against him. His colleagues wanted a case that would be suitably transnational and agreed it would be perfect for them. Figuring that the media exposure would be worth millions of dollars, they decided they would represent the athlete pro bono. ‘It was a winwin,’ Consonni recalled. ‘Everybody was happy.’
Consonni contacted Össur, who put him in touch with Peet van Zyl, Pistorius’s agent. Van Zyl, a South African, said that he and Pistorius would be in Italy at the end of January and they should meet. Consonni studied the case before the visit and discovered that his potential new client had only thirty days to make a legal challenge against the decision. When he met Pistorius and Van Zyl, he was surprised at how relaxed they both were. They told Consonni they were considering litigation, but only as a last resort, imagining that a few calls to the athletics federation would resolve the matter. They would ‘make a plan’, they said. Consonni thought they were being naive. He asked if they would authorize him, without any prior commitment, to phone the general counsel of the IAAF, to see where things stood. They agreed.
‘I called the IAAF lawyer, who was a Swiss guy,’ Consonni said, ‘and the minute I mentioned Oscar’s name he began to shout and rant. “I have no time for this!” he said. He was incredibly rude. He would not allow me to talk. He said there was no room for arbitration, no possibility of reconsidering the decision. I did not understand why, but he was completely hysterical. I just said, “Okay, fine. We’ll go for litigation.” ’
First, though, Consonni had to convince the athlete that his firm should represent him. A bigger law firm had also offered to act on Pistorius’s behalf, but it turned out to be a much easier sell than Consonni had expected.
‘Both said they liked the look of me. They said I reminded them of the guy in a film called The Hitman.’
Head shaven, six-foot tall, lean in a dark, pencil-sharp suit and stylish black-framed glasses, Consonni recalled the exchange with a cool smile over lunch at an elegant Milan restaurant. Speaking practically perfect English, he said that the moment he received the green light from his new clients he lodged a formal appeal against the ban and began preparing his strategy for when the case would be heard at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne in May. The CAS, set up by the International Olympic Committee in 1984, typically dealt with doping allegations. Never before had it come across a case in which the purported artificial stimulant was not a secretly consumed drug, but a pair of engineered artifacts that were there for all to see.
It was Pistorius’s first trial. It felt like life and death at the time – but was a stroll in the park compared with the one he would face in his home country six years later. There was one thing the two cases had in common, however: they caused a wide division of opinion. The difference was here the general public had little input. This was a matter for specialists, a reduced group of individuals who would claim science as their guide, and some of whom would pen papers on the subject in magazines like Scientific American and the Journal of Applied Psychology. Yet, empirical as the experts wanted to believe their thought processes were, some were more motivated by their passions – just as the opposing camps following the murder trial would be – than they would have cared to admit.
The first expert with whom Consonni sought to join forces was Hugh Herr, a professor at MIT, head of the biomechatronics research group at the MIT Media Lab, entrepreneur, and designer of some of the most technologically advanced leg prostheses in the world. Fortunately for Pistorius, the IAAF ban had caught Herr’s eye. Like Össur Kristinsson and Van Phillips, the American who invented the Cheetahs, Herr had been initially impelled to invest his creative energy in the improvement of prosthetic devices by personal misfortune. A prodigiously talented mountain climber, he had suffered severe frostbite at the age of seventeen after being trapped in a blizzard. Both his legs had to be amputated below the knees. Mirroring Pistorius’s spirit in the face of adversity, Herr promptly set about designing a type of prosthesis that would allow him to carry on climbing. Before long, he was ascending steep mountainsides better than before the accident, causing some of his rivals in competitive climbing to complain. Herr now had an unfair advantage, they said.
Naturally sympathetic to the plight of Pistorius, Herr did not hesitate to offer Consonni his services. The Italian was thrilled. ‘Our task was to refute the arguments made by Dr Brüggeman,’ he said. ‘We needed someone capable of doing so convincingly, and in Herr we found the very best in the biomechanical engineering business.’
Herr’s base of operations at the MIT Media Lab is a large, high-ceilinged room with giant video screens in each corner, where young scientists from all over the world huddle in circles, laptops at the ready, holding intense discussions. Herr, an intimidating figure to his students, had an android air about him that recalled Star Trek’s Mr Spock. Seen from the waist up, it would be impossible to tell from the naturalness of his walking gait that he lacked his lower limbs. But, as if he were a living advertisement for BIOM, the hi-tech prosthetics company he founded in 2007, he made no effort to disguise his condition. He was in the habit of wearing trousers cut off at the knees, exhibiting in all their futuristic wonder his bionically propelled pros-theses. A tiny green light flashing on and off at the point where the ankle joint would be in a normal human leg signaled that the legs were electronically powered and needed charging, while at the same time drawing attention to the fact that the genius and innovation of Herr’s creation resided in the joint’s uncannily natural mobility.
‘I want to get Oscar these,’ Herr said, apparently not having considered the possibility that in the event of Pistorius going to prison, such artifacts would probably be prohibited, regarded as potentially lethal weapons. There was nothing the brilliant professor could do to help him now, but back in early 2008 his capacious scientific mind was exactly what the athlete had needed. The scientific challenge appealed to Herr – as, perhaps, did the publicity that the association with Pistorius would give him. But there was also a personal motive behind his decision to enlist, free of charge, in the Pistorius cause. At first sight, Herr came across as dispassionate, but there was a moral principle at play here, one in which he had a fierce emotional stake.
‘It was obvious as light that there was discrimination,’ Herr said. ‘It was the very same bias we’ve seen against women, gays, blacks.’ To him, it became clear once he began to delve into the history of Pistorius’s IAAF ban that prejudice was the starting point and scientific reasoning only came later. As with most prejudices – not least those that used to drive the apartheid system in South Africa – the underpinning, Herr believed, was fear. ‘They said they wanted to preserve the purity of the sport, but the truth was,’ he said, ‘that they felt threatened.’
The threat was a vision of the future that t
hrilled Herr as much as it would appall the athletics federation.
‘Before the end of the century we will have a bionic leg that is faster than a biological leg. No doubt,’ Herr said. ‘That means the Olympics will be a celebration of natural bodies while the Paralympics will be more a celebration of a human machine in action, like a driver and racing car at Daytona. This leg you see me wearing today will be obsolete in a few years. We won’t use this piece of crap. Before the century is out, Paralympic athletes will far exceed the capacity of Olympic athletes and will draw far greater crowds. They will be jumping so much higher, running so much faster, that watching the natural bodies compete in the Olympics will seem boring by comparison.’
Warming to his theme, offering a glimpse of the pride he felt in his own story of redemption, Herr continued, ‘I lost my legs, but now I climb better than people with biological legs and I am regarded as a threat, like Oscar. That was why they shunned him and tried to stop him participating. They see in him a frightening vision of obsolescence, and all the more so because people like me and him come out of our experiences stronger than hell, armed with far greater psychological reserves.’