by John Carlin
In Gemona, where incomes are evenly spread and nobody goes hungry, Pistorius could breathe more easily. The sense of a load being lifted was the common experience of South Africans who traveled to Europe or the US; on returning home they would feel a tightening of the stomach muscles as they braced themselves once again to be on their guard. Alertness was the natural condition of people who lived in South Africa – a country in which the private security industry employed more than 400,000 people, twice the number of police officers; where traffic bulletins on the radio would routinely include news of street crossings where ‘smash-and-grabbers’ were reported to be operating; where youths begging on street corners would carry boards that read ‘I will die of hunger before I steal’, signaling their own respect for the law but reminding potential benefactors of the constant threat of crime. Being away from this mayhem for a prolonged stretch in a place where crime was less prevalent only heightened the anxiety on one’s return.
Pistorius always carried a gun for protection when he was in South Africa, and if he drove fast it was in part because he was obsessed with speed, but also to improve his chances of escape in the event of an attempted car-jacking. On the road he often suspected he was being followed by another vehicle. At night, he would park his car only in a well-lit area. In a restaurant, he would check the exits and entrances on arrival and choose to sit with his back to the wall, in a position where he could scan the room should he need to respond quickly to a hold-up. When he stayed in a hotel and there was a knock at his room door, he would always first ask who it was and then keep the latch on as he opened the door. Peet van Zyl, his agent, said that when Pistorius heard an unexpected bang, such as a car backfiring, he would grab his arm in fright.
All South Africans are vigilant, few more vigilant than Pistorius. The measures people took to protect their homes would rise in proportion to their incomes. His uncle Arnold had twenty-four-hour sentries at the gate of his fortified castle of a home, as well as a sophisticated alarm system and a corrugated metal screen between the gym and the rest of the house, which he could lower or raise electronically at the press of a button. After apartheid, when people of all races were allowed to move at will in previously all-white residential areas, those with money increasingly took to living in gated communities. In the suburbs of East Pretoria, where Pistorius lived, most people sheltered themselves within compounds surrounded by high walls and razor wire, and patrolled by armed guards in quasi-military vehicles. Built on what had once been bare, dry veldt, they had names like Faerie Glen, or Forest Manor, or Nature’s Valley, as if devised by the marketing departments of real-estate companies specifically to counter the impression of prospective buyers that they would be living inside an army garrison or behind the walls of a prison. But it was a price people thought worth paying, to keep the barbarians outside the gates.
And not just white people, as would have been the case in the early years of democracy. Silver Woods, where Pistorius lived between 2008 and Valentine’s Day of 2013, offered an idealized picture of racial harmony in the New South Africa, unimaginable during the apartheid years. The 170 homes in Silver Woods were cheerfully inclusive of all races and, for that matter, sexual inclinations. Pistorius’s two closest neighbors, with whom he had always got on cordially, were black, and a gay female couple lived four doors down from him. The residents here were either professionals (one of his next-door neighbors was a doctor) or senior civil servants or, in some cases, foreign diplomats.
New homes were being built every day in Silver Woods, but there were no rules enforcing a uniform architectural style. Some were designed in a grand, wedding-cake Tuscan style; others had the pastel feel of Spanish Mediterranean villas. In a few cases the owners had opted for large, brutishly imposing red-brick bunkers, somewhat at odds with the palm trees that lined the roads. But 286 Bushwillow Street, where Pistorius lived, was a cubic, streamlined, self-consciously modern construction, a fittingly sleek abode for a young man who in full Blade Runner dress could transform himself into a futuristic science-fiction superhero. The angles were sharp, the lines straight, the stone walls a uniform silvery-grey. Two big wooden doors guarded the garage where he kept his automobiles and, adorning the space in front of the main door, were a couple of cacti, shrubs, short trees and a small, impeccably tended, lawn.
He had an alarm system in the house – which to anyone who did not know South Africa would have seemed like an extreme precaution, given that the estate felt as secure as the Bank of England. In addition to the electrified twelve-foot perimeter walls that were standard in the area, CCTV and underground sensors ringed the complex, setting off alarms that would summon an armed response team if anybody thought to approach them. The security procedure for entering the Silver Woods fortress was exhaustive. A fingerprint coding device for residents automatically lifted the two sets of barriers that guarded the single entrance, but visitors not only had to supply official identity documents and have their vehicle license numbers noted down by a guard, but also had to identify exactly who they were visiting and then have the guard phone ahead to confirm before they could be let in. Sometimes the security measures became too much even for the people living there. One resident told how her seventy-year-old mother had arrived at the entrance one day and supplied all the information that was needed, except for her daughter’s phone number, which she had misplaced, and as a consequence, despite her indignant protestations, was not allowed in.
On another occasion, a truck-load of laborers arrived from Johannesburg to work on the construction of a new home. Four of the them only had photocopies of their ID. The entire truck was denied entry. Laborers who did make it through the gates were obliged to leave the complex by 5 p.m. each day. If anyone overstayed that limit, his company would be fined and the laborer would not be allowed to go home; he would effectively be held hostage until the full amount was paid.
Once inside, visitors would notice that the bucolic atmosphere was tempered by the spectacle of uniformed guards on constant patrol, on foot with dogs or on bicycles. There were electronic devices at strategic locations around the complex where the guards were obliged to register their presence at predetermined times, by checking in with an individually allotted plastic card. This went on day and night.
But while other residents who admitted to being generally nervous about crime said that they had discovered at Silver Woods a peace they had not known before, Pistorius not only had his own home alarm system, he had also kept a gun by his bedside and a cricket bat and baseball bat behind his bedroom door for defense in case of attack. Others slept easily at Silver Woods, but Pistorius, often beset by insomnia, did not. Asked by a British journalist in 2012, before the start of the London Olympic Games, whether he ever felt vulnerable, he dropped his guard and replied that yes, he did, when he was lying in bed without his prostheses on and heard a noise in the middle of the night.
On one occasion, hearing just such a noise, Pistorius rushed out of bed to confront the suspected intruder with his gun in his hand. It was a friend who was sleeping over and had got up to fetch a glass of water.
Yet Pistorius felt vulnerable inside his home even when he did have his artificial legs on, such as the time when he arrived home after dark and heard a noise in the kitchen. He drew a gun he was carrying and advanced stealthily towards the suspected intruder in what he would later describe to friends, self-mockingly, as ‘full combat mode’. On entering the kitchen, he discovered that the sound he had heard was the churning of a tumble dryer.
On another occasion, he was watching a film on TV at the home of a friend in Johannesburg when he dozed off. The noise of gunshots awoke him with a start. The sound was entirely fictional, part of the action in the film, but he jumped up and ran out of the room in a panic.
One incident in 2012, two months before the London Olympic Games, revealed to two startled onlookers the degree of not just panic, but hysteria, with which he was capable of reacting when he felt his safety was under threat.
Chiziweni would be part of the small group who would see Pistorius coming down the stairs on February 14 the following year, with Reeva Steenkamp’s bleeding body in his arms. He would tell police he had not heard anything, even though he had been in his room on the ground floor when the shooting happened. The police were baffled, believing him either to be either extraordinarily loyal or an extraordinarily deep sleeper. The question would not be resolved either then or in the subsequent murder trial, for he never appeared as a witness in court.
Chiziweni was a small, sweet-natured and obliging man in his thirties, who welcomed the TV crew into Pistorius’s home and assented to their request to be allowed to bring in their unwieldy equipment not by the front entrance but through the big garage doors. Half an hour later, his boss, who had been training at a nearby athletics track, arrived.
On seeing the garage doors open, leaving the whole house vulnerable, Pistorius stormed into the kitchen and confronted Frankie in a thundering rage. He was not his ‘brother’ any more. He was ‘a fucking arsehole’. With the cameraman and sound-man looking on, he screamed, ‘What the fuck are you doing? Have I not told you a thousand fucking times to close that garage door? Are you fucking mad? Don’t you hear what I fucking tell you?’ On he continued in that vein, frightening and humiliating his employee, shocking the two TV men. They had regarded him as a national hero and had only ever seen him the way he projected himself in public, as mild, courteous and self-effacing. Now they were seeing him in a hot rage and were staggered by the violence of his language. They sought to intervene and explain that it was all their fault, that they should take the blame, for it had been they who had proposed entering through the garage doors. But he would not hear them and continued heaping the vilest recriminations on the terrified Chiziweni. Then, abruptly, he turned round and went up the stairs to take a shower.
He reappeared refreshed and in a change of clothes, the picture of aplomb, with a broad smile of welcome on his face, as if the incident with his housekeeper had never happened, as if he were a different man. All the rage of a few minutes earlier had gone and he sat down before the camera composed, reciting the old prefabricated phrases, drawing the usual distinctions between his disability and his ability, proclaiming his pride at being able to represent his nation in London. The feature that was later broadcast made no mention of his outburst and portrayed him in a glowing and heroic light.
Everywhere Pistorius went in London in the summer of 2012, he saw posters of himself advertising either one of the products he endorsed or the Olympics themselves. He struggled to believe it at times, but he was vying with Usain Bolt, the Jamaican who was the fastest sprinter in history, for the title of King of the Games. He had failed to qualify for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, but after two months of preparation in Gemona he had smashed his own personal 400 meters record at a race in July 2011 in Lignano, on Italy’s Adriatic coast, which he won with a time of 45.07 seconds. On his return to Gemona, an hour’s drive north, he was met with scenes of wild delight. It was in the same spirit that he was greeted now in London whenever he made a public appearance.
No South African visitor to the city had received a more fawning reception from the media since Nelson Mandela, who four years earlier had chosen London to celebrate his ninetieth birthday. Photographers, journalists and members of the public turned up to gawp at a training session at the end of July, a week before Pistorius’s first race. He greeted everyone present with a handshake. Should he have happened to miss someone, he would go back, reach out a hand and say, ‘I think I forgot to greet you.’ He paid special attention to his younger fans, children who regarded him as a sort of cartoon action superhero. Some would ask him, ‘How can I get legs like yours?’ To the more inquisitive ones who wanted to know how he had lost his lower legs, he would reply with the old joke his mother had taught him to tell at school: a shark had eaten them.
Charmed and in awe of him, sports journalists produced one article after another celebrating him as the very incarnation of the Olympic spirit, stretching back to the Games’ beginnings in ancient Greece. In tribute to his virtues they would quote Lucian, the author who wrote in the second century AD about the Olympic athletes’ ‘unstoppable passion for victory’. In his hotel room, Pistorius would read the purple prose with delight, pausing at passages such as this one, from London’s Daily Telegraph: ‘That he has confounded all logic is evidence not of something mechanical but very human: the triumphant power of will . . . Pistorius’s very presence in London should be lauded to the murky skies as the epitome of the Olympic purpose.’
But as the clock ticked down for his Olympic debut on August 4, Pistorius was secretly consumed with anxiety. What if he made a laughing-stock of himself? What if he repeated the fiasco of Sheffield in 2007, when he had competed against able-bodied runners and not only came last, but way last, and was disqualified for straying out of his lane? Pistorius the hero would be reduced to Pistorius the plucky disabled athlete who should have known better than to pit himself against the world’s best. Those who had argued that he should never have been allowed to take part in the Olympics, that a disabled runner should not compete against able-bodied competitors, would be vindicated. He would have to endure the fate he most dreaded, of finding himself provoking more pity than admiration.
No one, not even Pistorius, expected that he’d win a medal. Rarely, if ever, had an athlete with no hope of winning ever played such a starring role at any sports event, let alone the Olympic Games. Pistorius just wanted to do well in the preliminary heats of the 400 meters competition, maybe beating at least some of his rivals in the field of eight. To run a time fast enough to make it to the next round, the semi-finals, would be a dream. Reaching the final, the last eight, was almost out of the question, given the times already recorded by the world’s fastest competitors. That first race was the moment he had been preparing for since winning the CAS ruling in Lausanne in 2008 and which would put the stamp of victory on the battle he had waged all his life to deny the limitations of his disability.
On the day of his race, all other Olympic events and competitors were overshadowed by the excitement, trumpeted in newspapers the world over, at the realization that history was about to be made. It would be the first time a runner with amputated legs would compete in the Games – one of the unlikeliest sports stories ever told. It felt Homeric, the stuff of myth. Or thus, at any rate, did the TV commentators and sports journalists rhapsodize, echoing the public mood. Tickets for the Olympic Stadium were sold out. Eighty thousand people would be there to roar him on, among them his uncle Arnold and his wife Lois, his sister Aimée, his brother Carl, and their grandmother Gerti. Glory beckoned, but all that morning he could not keep out of his mind the alternative possibility, that it could all fall embarrassingly flat for him. Would people say when the race was over that he had earned his right to be there, or would they regard his presence in the competition as clownish, as many had done with the Jamaican bobsled team in the Winter Olympics? Would they end up dismissing him, after all, as a freakish sideshow?
In these moments of self-doubt, Pistorius summoned up the memory of his mother. He recalled, for the umpteenth time, the note she had written him when he was a small child that said, ‘The real loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last. The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete.’ He recited those old words to himself in the locker room; he imagined how unutterably proud she would have been of him, or how unuttera
bly proud she was as she looked down on him from heaven – and all doubts flew away, replaced by a resolve to do justice to the limitless faith she had shown in him.
His mother remained in his mind as he stepped out into the vast arena of London’s Olympic Stadium. It was only a preliminary heat, but the roar of the crowd suggested that it was the biggest, most eagerly awaited event in the entire Games. It might have been a soccer World Cup final or a heavyweight boxing championship in which he was the crowd’s undisputed favorite. Pistorius saw a few South African flags, but they gave no sense of the unanimous support he had in a foreign arena where they were all South Africans now. No one wanted him to run the race of his life more, or knew how much it meant to him or what the humiliation of failure would mean, than his family members seated low down alongside the starting blocks, studying his eyes. They could see that he was fighting to control his nerves, all the more so when a TV cameraman, ignoring the rest of the field, headed straight for him and pointed the camera in his face. The image was being watched live by millions worldwide, among them his father and Dr Gerry Versfeld in a Johannesburg bar, but Pistorius rose theatrically to the occasion, as he had done many times before, giving a thumbs up first, then raising his right hand to his temple and making a military officer’s salute. The stadium announcer ran through the names of the eight runners. In lane number five, he bellowed, ‘Oscar . . . Pisto-o-o-ri-us . . . the Blade Runner!’
Giant screens flashed images of two other runners who had left an indelible mark on the Olympic Games: Jesse Owens, the black American runner who confounded Hitler’s notions of Aryan racial superiority with his four gold medals in Berlin in 1936; and Cathy Freeman, the Aborigine who won gold for Australia in the 400 meters in Sydney in 2000. Each had triumphed after overcoming poverty and prejudice.