by John Carlin
How he had lost his arms was not a taboo subject. He would, quite matter of factly, tell anyone who asked that it had happened when he was nine years old when he grabbed a pair of live electrical cables while playing with friends in the Johannesburg township where he grew up. He was laid up in hospital for nine months and every day his mother came to sit by his side, looking cheerful and optimistic. It was only very recently, fifteen years after the accident, he said, that his mother had confessed to him that she had cried every time on the way to hospital and cried all the way back home. ‘It shocked me when she told me because she was always smiling when I saw her,’ Samkelo said, ‘but it made me love my mother even more. It made me realize how fortunate I am to have the family I have.’
His other stroke of fortune was to have met his favorite sportsman at a point in his life when he was not sure what his own priorities should be. From one day to the next, he threw himself into disabled athletic competition, from 100 to 800 meters, to long jump, to high jump, to cycling. He set new records, won gold medals. ‘And all in the very year I met Oscar! It was absolutely no coincidence that I made it into the South African national team. Hard, hard, hard work was the key, and Oscar was the spark that got me going.’
Samkelo gesticulated exuberantly with his stunted arms as he spoke, excited to talk about his athletics career and the role the champion who would become his friend had played in it. Five years after they met, in 2011, the two were competing side by side at the world disabled games in New Zealand. ‘Me and some of the other younger athletes hung out with Oscar and he completely confirmed that first impression he’d made on me. He was just a regular guy. He was a superstar, but he never made you feel that he thought he was superior. He showed us pictures of the cars he’d driven, places he had been, of his home. But it wasn’t showing off. We really wanted to know all about him. But he also helped us with practical stuff, telling us what we should do and not do to avoid getting injured and be in peak condition when we needed to be.’
The highlight of Christchurch for Samkelo was when he represented South Africa in the 4 × 100 meters relay alongside his boyhood hero. Samkelo ran the first leg. ‘Oscar said to me before the race, “If you false start I’m gonna run all the way around the track and smack you.” I said, “You won’t catch me.” He said, “Trust me, I will!” We were smiling and laughing but then he turned serious and said, “Okay, let’s have fun, enjoy it, do what we have to do.” It was captain talk and we accepted it as such. He said enjoy it and we did. And we won the race. For me Oscar was a big brother.’
But Samkelo also saw something in his big brother during that visit to New Zealand that took him aback. He discovered that the man he had put on a pedestal was much more emotionally fragile than he let on. For the first time in his seven years as a disabled runner, Pistorius lost a race. It was in the 100 meters, against a one-legged American runner called Jerome Singleton. Samkelo was there watching.
‘Oscar cried after the race and on the team bus on the way home it was really awkward for the rest of us. He was so upset, fighting back tears until he just let go and wept inconsolably. I remember thinking, Wow! This really is his life, his whole life.’
Samkelo, then at law school, reflected that he had done well to spread his options more widely. Running fast gave him joy and made him proud, but studying for a degree consumed his energies as much, giving his life a balance, a perspective, and a contact with the real world of everyday work that his friend lacked. Samkelo did not receive sponsorships or the free use of fast cars but he had a future beyond sports. Seeing Pistorous break down on that bus in New Zealand gave Samkelo a glimpse of the vulnerability behind the superhero facade. Yet, he said, it made him value his friend’s virtues all the more.
Just as vivid for Samkelo was the recollection of Pistorius’s generosity on a night out in Christchurch after the games were over. ‘We wanted to go out and see the town but we were a bit nervous. We didn’t know our way around and we also had very little money. So he said, “No, guys. I’ll pay. I’ll look after you. Let’s go.” And he paid for the taxi and took us to a bar and he bought the drinks and made us all feel so special. He’d say, “You guys still okay? You ready to go home? If you want to, just tell me.” He was so considerate. He knew this was his world, but not ours. He really was like a big brother, herding the kids around, introducing us to this grown-up, foreign world.’
Samkelo never socialized with Pistorius outside of athletics, but they formed what would become a lasting bond a year after New Zealand when they ran together in the 2012 Paralympic Games in London. The Olympic Stadium was as full every day as it had been a month earlier for the Olympics themselves. At previous Paralympic competitions, in Beijing, Sydney and elsewhere, there had always been plenty of empty seats, but for several of the events in London there was standing room only. Scalpers sold tickets at inflated prices outside the venues. There was wall-to-wall coverage on British TV and the broadcasts were transmitted live around the world. Big banners in London read ‘Paralympics, we are the superhumans’. The more sober message the event’s organizers strove to convey was that the games were ‘about ability, not disability – about what people can do, not what they cannot do’.
There was more than an echo there of one of Pistorius’s favorite catchphrases. The MIT professor Hugh Herr, who followed his performances in London keenly, picked it up. ‘It was Oscar, fresh from making history in the Olympics, who drove the whole thing,’ Herr said. ‘The image projected with brilliant orchestration by the Brit marketing people was that their stories here were not about cripples but about gladiators, and Oscar was the big brand around which the marketing strategy was built. His story was THE story. Everyone knew it. He was at the top of that wave, the king of the Games.’
Through the ages, disabled people had endured a kind of apartheid. Discriminated against, they felt they lived in a separate world. The London Paralympics helped bridge the gap as never before. Opinion polls conducted in Britain before the closing ceremony showed that 81 per cent of respondents believed that the London Games had made a positive impact on the way people with physical impairments were viewed. Disabled men and women who were not involved in the games began appearing before the media to say they were experiencing a degree of recognition and social acceptance they had never known before.
As for the disabled athletes, mostly left alone in the cities where previous Paralympics Games had been held, in London they would find themselves mobbed when they wandered out of the residential compound, besieged for photographs by members of the public – all the more so in Samkelo’s case when it was discovered that he was the Blade Runner’s team mate.
Tadhg Slattery, another member of the South African Paralympic team, had been with Pistorius at the Games in Athens and Beijing in 2004 and 2008. Tadhg was old enough to be Pistorius’s father and had been winning medals in Paralympic swimming since the Barcelona games of 1992 – two years after Mandela’s release from prison, when the ban on South Africa competing in international sports was lifted. Tadhg was deaf and had cerebral palsy. Through sign language and with the help of his brother and swimming coach, Cormac, he spoke of the esteem he felt for his celebrated team mate, recalling one moment in Beijing in 2008 when Cormac and his mother had come across Pistorius in the athletes’ village. Pistorius detected a family resemblance, asked them if they were Tadgh’s mother and brother, and told them he was immensely grateful they had flown all that way to support them all. ‘He was the nicest man you could ever hope to meet,’ said Cormac, with Tadhg nodding vigorously alongside.
On Pistorius’s triumphant return to Johannesburg after Beijing, having won gold in three races, he gave a press conference at the airport, making a point of calling Tadhg over to the camera and putting an arm over his shoulder. But it was an encounter in London that sealed the Slattery family’s love affair with him. It happened in the large dining room where the athletes always ate, just two days after his angry outburst following defeat in the 2
00 meters against Alan Oliveira, the Brazilian runner he had accused of cheating. ‘He wasn’t in a good place,’ Cormac recalled, ‘and I would have forgiven him if he had been less considerate than he was.’
There was no need. Tadhg had recently announced his decision to marry a woman who had a twenty-two-year-old son. The son, who was called Calvin, and had some misgivings about his future stepfather, was in the athletes’ dining room with Cormac when they saw Pistorius sitting at a nearby table. Calvin could hardly repress his excitement, but when Cormac suggested they go and say hello he turned shy. Cormac persuaded him to come along with him, and duly made the introduction. Tadhg learned what happened next from his brother.
‘Oscar saw us approaching and he immediately got to his feet,’ Cormac recalled. ‘He didn’t just shake Calvin’s hand, he gave him a big man-hug, shoulder to shoulder, and said, “Great to meet you!” But then he went further, as if immediately understanding what the situation was. “You should know,” he told Calvin, “that your future stepfather is one of the greatest guys I’ve met.” Tadhg, who was devastated when he heard of the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp six months later, would never forget his kindness.
Nor would Arnu Fourie, another disabled South African athlete, forget how much he owed Pistorius. A sprinter and, like Samkelo, a member of the South African 4 × 100 meters relay team, Arnu Fourie had suffered a terrible misfortune when he was eighteen years old. An Afrikaner and a rugby fanatic – two characteristics that tended to go hand in hand – Arnu had what seemed like a glorious career ahead of him as one of rugby’s top players when he lost a leg in a boating accident. He was in the water and the propeller of the boat caught him twice, severing first his foot, then his leg, just below the calf. That was in 2003. It took him four years to begin to make peace with his disability. He wore jeans, never shorts. Bitter and depressed, he struggled to confront his loss. ‘I went once to take part in a golf tournament for disabled people and I’d hear some of them make jokes about their missing limbs,’ he said. ‘I had no sense of humor about what had happened to me.’
In 2006 he decided to try running, but the experiment might have been short-lived. He took part in a 100 meters race against able-bodied runners, with calamitous results. He ran using his regular, walking prosthetic leg and came last, thirty meters behind the rest of the field, in 13.9 seconds. Embarrassed and forlorn, he had a choice to make – never to try this again, or to ensure that, if he did, there would be no repeat of his humiliation. He decided to try again, but in order to have any chance of success that meant acquiring a Cheetah running blade, and Cheetahs were expensive. He could not afford it. As with Samkelo, the turning point came when he met Pistorius.
‘I got in touch with Oscar and asked him if I could come along to one of his training sessions. He said, “Sure,” so I went to Pretoria and stayed with my mom, who lives there. Oscar was open and friendly and took an interest in me. I also remember that he went out of his way to greet my mom. He was very polite to her. To me, he said he would do anything he could to help.’
Pistorius was as good as his word, giving Arnu one of his old blades and putting him in touch with his childhood prosthetics specialist, Trevor Brauckmann, for the all-important business of fixing him up with a socket that would fit snugly. ‘The first time it felt very weird,’ Arnu said. ‘The brain does not realize the blade’s there, so you have to make a sort of leap of the imagination. But I got running and in two months my time was down to 12.1 seconds. I realized that even against able-bodied runners I did not have to be last. I was suddenly incredibly motivated.’
So much so, that he brought his time for the 100 meters down to 11.9 seconds and made it into the Paralympic team in Beijing in 2008, and again in London four years later, both times sharing a room and becoming close friends with Pistorius. Arnu got to learn that Pistorius was a more complex person than he had imagined when he first met him. One day at the Beijing Games, Pistorius had flown into a fury with South Africa’s Paralympic management team for what he saw as their failure to provide him with adequate training equipment. It was not the only time he became enraged with team officials who, he believed, fell short of the total dedication that he himself invested in his sport. His obsession with sticking to the strict requirements of his diet also produced some ugly incidents; people who had been in restaurants with him reported that sometimes he would explode with rage when a waiter did not bring him exactly what he believed he had asked for.
What few were as aware of as Arnu Fourie was the wild, tortured state he got into over his girlfriends – in particular Samantha Taylor, and specifically in the middle of 2012, when the relationship was going through a difficult patch.
Pistorius found out during the London Games that she had gone on a trip to Dubai with Quinton van der Burgh. Samantha, who had accused him of having an affair in New York with a Russian model, understood that they had broken up – but this did not stop him from succumbing to fits of raging jealousy. With his mind half on the races ahead and half on his aching heart, continually beset by requests from the media, sponsors and fans, he spent his time away from the track in the athletes’ village making frantic phone calls, checking his text messages and WhatsApps, veering from hysteria one moment to measured, professional calm the next.
Arnu, a level-headed and happily married man, sympathized with his friend, but asked to be allowed to move to a room on his own. ‘Oscar is a guy who loses his temper easily, sure,’ Arnu said. ‘He’s always lived with stress and I think he feeds off it, but sometimes it gets too much for him. The stress on him in London was enormous. London was the center of the world in the summer of 2012 and after Usain Bolt, or maybe right alongside him, he was the biggest thing there. Never mind the public, all the other athletes wanted pictures taken with him, and autographs, and he always went along with it, to keep that worship thing going, to live up to it. But you saw him at night when he was off the stage and the lights went out and he was just a normal guy and you could feel how it all weighed him down, that pressure to remain unbeatable, untouchable, perfect . . . But on the other hand, he couldn’t live without it. He loved being the center of attention.’
Arnu did not begrudge him that. ‘He earned it. His whole life he’s had to fight – losing his mum, losing his dad – and he has always shown this huge drive. I love his attitude. All his life he’s been like this. He just cannot believe he cannot do things.’
That helped explain Pistorius’s fury when he lost to Oliveira, the Brazilian, in the 200 meters in London. He had won the 400 meters Paralympic gold – his third in successive games – with his accustomed ease, but coming second in the 200 had shattered his sense of invincibility, and it rankled. A chance to avenge that defeat came in the 4 × 100 meters relay, where Samkelo and Arnu, who had won bronze in the individual 100 meters, would be his team-mates.
The race took place on September 5, 2012, and Pistorius assumed the unofficial role of relay team captain. When he and the three other runners went to limber up on the practice track alongside the Olympic Stadium before the race, it was he who gathered them round, gave the team talk, reminded them that the danger came from the Brazilians but also from the Americans, who had won this race in Beijing.
There was an odd symmetry about the South African four. Samkelo, who would run first, was missing both arms; Zivan Smith, who would run second, was missing one arm; Arnu, third, was missing one leg; Pistorius, running last, was missing both legs. As Samkelo would joke later, ‘We were the perfect team. A double-leg amputee, a double-arm amputee, a single-leg amputee, a single-arm amputee. How perfect is that? God looked at the four of us and said, “Okay, I’ll make this one perfect, just because I can.” God, man, has a great sense of humor!’
So did Samkelo, yet, for all his attempts at light-heartedness, he was the team’s biggest worry as they gathered on the practice track. He had torn a hamstring the week before. ‘It was the London weather’s fault,’ Samkelo smiled. ‘Cold, hot, rain, hot, cold – you get fo
ur seasons in one hour over here.’ But he was desperate to run. He had prepared ten years for this, the greatest moment of his life; he was determined to take part even if it meant the end of his career. Wanting Pistorius’s blessing, Samkelo approached him the day before the race and said, ‘Running with you, Oscar, and running for my country is my dream. I will not let you down.’ Pistorius took him at his word and the South African team decided to take the risk and let Samkelo run.
But now, as they went through their preparations on the practice track, with only minutes to go before the big race, Samkelo was giving Pistorius, his other two team-mates and the coaches new grounds for worry. He was overexcited, or excessively nervous – ‘or something’, as Samkelo said – and when all four lined up for a rehearsal he messed up. Samkelo was the team’s starter, the one who would run the first 100 meter leg, and he bolted from the blocks too soon. The worst thing that could possibly happen would be for him to make a false start when the real race began, for if he did he would be disqualified, along with the rest of the team.
Pistorius saw that Samkelo was distraught. He heard the coaches groan, noticed them shaking their heads. If the little guy was messing up now on a practice run, how would he cope when the real race began in front of 80,000 people? All seemed lost.
Pistorius took charge. He went up to Samkelo, took him to one side, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Okay, Sam, listen to me. Relax. Think. Do not move a muscle when you hear “Get set!”. Wait until you hear the gun. Wait! And then, and then you must run faster than your shadow. Chase your shadow! Chase it! And, I promise you, you will catch it.’