Chase Your Shadow

by John Carlin

The pep talk worked. As Samkelo confessed later, ‘Had Oscar not come over and given me that confidence, I’d have crapped myself I was so nervous.’

  Samkelo tried again in practice, and again one more time, and both times he got the start right. Then all four gathered in a huddle, prayed in English and in Afrikaans, and stepped out into the amphitheater, greeted by a roar that sounded to Samkelo like a hundred jumbo jets at take-off. When his name was called out, he raised his arms in the air and blew kisses to the crowd, pressing his stumps to his lips.

  Pistorius saw Samkelo’s reaction on the big stadium screen. He looked not just happy, but ecstatic. He would be just fine, Pistorius realized. But would the others be? Would he? He wasn’t smiling. His face was grim-set, imagining the race ahead. Would Samkelo, Ziva and Arnu give him the lead he felt he needed for the final stretch, where he would be running against the feared Oliveira?

  A lesser consideration, but one that mattered to him all the same, was how the crowd would react to him after his behavior a few days earlier when he had lost to the Brazilian. He need not have worried. When his name was called out, he received the loudest cheer of the Games. It felt as if they had forgiven him – a huge relief. Now he had to show that he merited their faith.

  At the cry ‘On your marks!’, the stadium fell silent, as if someone had turned off a switch. It was so silent that, as he stood there, watching Samkelo on the other side of the field, he could hear his own pulse. Then it was ‘Get set!’, and the gun went off. Another roar blasted from the stadium, only to subside a second later when the runners slowed down, ordered back to the blocks. There had been a false start. ‘Not Samkelo, please!’ he thought. It had not been Samkelo. Pistorius thanked God for that.

  Again, ‘On your marks!’, ‘Get set!’ – and again, a false start. Not Samkelo this time either. And then, at the third attempt, the race began. Batons were not an option when there were runners in the field, like Samkelo, with no hands. At the changeovers, the runners only had to tap the team-mate ahead.

  Samkelo finished his 100 meter leg neck and neck with his far bigger and more muscular American rival, but the South African changeover was smoother and Ziva led the field by a whisker around the first bend. Pistorius clenched his fists with satisfaction and glanced at Arnu, who would be next up. He had never seen his friend so pumped up. The changeover between Ziva and Arnu was flawless and now Arnu was charging towards him like a mad bull, extending the South African lead. Pistorius would have no excuse if they didn’t win, and he knew it. His heart beat faster and faster as Arnu drew closer and closer, the muscles on his neck almost bursting, his face twisted, almost terrifying, as he reached out to touch him and then bellowed to him, as if in a wild rage, to run, run for his life. Pistorius did. He felt Oliveira breathing down his neck. The Brazilian was gaining ground, but he was not going to let him win a second time. Not today. Pistorius dipped his head, broke the tape, made it across the line first. He had won. South Africa had won. Pistorius covered his face in his hands, he grinned, then he covered his face in his hands again, as if not knowing whether to feel relief or joy. The stadium exploded. Samkelo, Ziva and Arnu ran towards him, screaming, as Samkelo would remember later, ‘like girls’. Samkelo wrapped his stumps around his neck and jumped into his arms. Then they saw the time: 41.75 seconds. A new world record. They screamed again. Samkelo was going nuts, shouting, ‘We won gold, man! And we broke the world record! We broke the world record! Fuck, man! Fuck, man! Fuck!’

  And then the lap of honor; but before that, at Pistorius’s bidding, a team huddle and a prayer of thanks; and after that, the medal ceremony and the South African anthem – a blend of two songs, first the old anthem of white South Africa, ‘Die Stem’, ‘The Call’, and then the old anthem of black protest, ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’, ‘God Bless Africa’. Samkelo sang and smiled and laughed. Pistorius struggled to get the words out. The stadium’s giant screens showed that his eyes were filled with tears.

  Five months later, on February 7, 2013, Pistorius had a meeting with his agent, Peet van Zyl, to discuss the commercial opportunities that had come his way since London. ‘You’re going to make stupid money. Stupid money!’ Van Zyl had told him. Contracts that needed to be signed or to be examined lay on a big table before them. There was the sportswear brand Nike; there was the sunglasses manufacturer Oakley; there was Össur, the company that made his running blades – all of which were extending arrangements they had had in place for several years. Among the new deals on offer, there was one he was about to sign with a big US company that would net him, according to Van Zyl (who refused to name the company), three times what even Nike paid him, as well as a deal with France’s Thierry Mugler to promote a new men’s cologne called Pure Shot.

  Initially, the idea had been for Pistorius to retire after the Rio de Janeiro Olympics and Paralympics in 2016, but Van Zyl had persuaded him to continue for one more year, until he was nearly thirty-one. His financial future – and Van Zyl’s – seemed assured. The stupid money he would earn would allow him to buy himself a large new house in Johannesburg, as well as a fabulously expensive state-of-the-art McLaren car, which he had already ordered and which was due to arrive in South Africa from the factory in England in March. He’d be able to add to a collection of racehorses, a recent passion, in which he already had shares, and would be free, most of all, to enjoy his life with Reeva.

  He told Van Zyl at that meeting about plans he had made to travel with Reeva to Italy, his favorite country, later in the year. He was going to show her Milan and Venice, Gemona too, and they were both so excited at the prospect. They had also planned a trip to Rio de Janeiro, where she, who had never had the money for expensive foreign trips, had always dreamed of going. And they’d visit lots of other places, too. But there was more to it all than fun, he told Van Zyl. He was serious about Reeva, and he planned to do something with her in the European summer that he had never done with a girlfriend before: take her to an athletics meeting in which he would be competing – specifically, to one in Manchester. He wanted her to get to know him in his work environment, to give her a chance to see him when he was distant, obsessive and self-engrossed, so she could see all the facets of his personality and judge whether she would be able to put up with his grumpiness and outright bad temper when he was focused, to the exclusion of all else, on a big race. He would be honest with her, but he hoped he would pass the test, laying the basis for the possibility of a future life together, of marriage and maybe children. The two of them had been spending time on the internet poring over options for the furniture for his new Johannesburg home.

  A week after the meeting with his agent, Pistorius had shot Reeva, killing her, as well as his dreams, his career, his reputation, his peace of mind – and condemning himself, when he was obliged to sell everything he owned to cover his legal costs, to bankruptcy.

  His Paralympic team-mates, who had won so much with him, had a sharper sense of his loss than most. On the morning of February 14, 2013, they reacted to the news with horror and incomprehension. Tadhg Slattery saw a headline on his smartphone that read ‘Pistorius’ and ‘murder’ and asked himself, ‘How can this possibly be true?’

  Samkelo woke up to learn what had happened from his girlfriend. ‘I was in a state of utter disbelief,’ he said. ‘First, I thought she must have surprised him and he thought it was an intruder sneaking up on him, but as the story unfolded I saw it wasn’t that. It wasn’t the kind of accident I initially had in mind. I didn’t know what to think.’

  The Pistorius that Samkelo had known bore little relation to the man he read about in the newspapers over the following days and weeks. Samkelo had no knowledge of the people Pistorius mixed with, or the fast life he led outside athletics; neither did he know that he was mad about guns. Now he was coming across stories of Pistorius being drunk and angry and abusive to people. Some were exaggerated, in keeping with the South African media’s need to give the public the portrait of a villainous Pistorius that they seemed
to want. But much was true. Pistorius’s own lawyers would seek to come up with support for Pistorius’s explanation at the murder trial, offering evidence of scientific research to demonstrate that it was not unusual for individuals with physical disabilities to harbor a deep existential frustration at their condition, inclining some of them to respond to a perceived threat in a shockingly disproportionate manner.

  ‘I never saw any of that in Oscar myself,’ said Samkelo, who appeared to contradict the research, offering an example of a disabled man serenely reconciled to his limitations. To him, what had happened at his friend’s home on Valentine’s Day was a mystery.

  ‘Only God and that poor girl and Oscar know what happened,’ Samkelo said. ‘He wasn’t thinking, he went crazy, with no mind for the repercussions. If it was an intruder, he was so scared, so out of his mind to protect himself and his girlfriend. Whatever the case, the time in which it happened was nothing, the time that divides a win and second place in a 100 meters race. Often we act on instinct, THEN we reason. That instinct was let loose in a split second, a split second that will decide how his life will be defined.’

  Discussing the looming murder trial, Samkelo abandoned his good cheer, turned solemn and became more legally precise in his use of language, as if assuming the role of articled clerk that he was soon to take up at a top Johannesburg law firm. For all the affection and gratitude he professed towards his friend, he would not play God, as millions of people who did not know Pistorius had done, and state unequivocally whether or not he had intentionally killed Reeva Steenkamp. Yet Samkelo said that on one point his mind was clear: it was not fair to define Pistorius’s entire life by what had happened that night, even if he understood why people might wish to think that way.

  ‘It’s a human nature thing. Everyone who does not know Oscar personally is influenced by the media. It happens to all of us. I do it with cases of murder I hear about involving people I do not know, especially if the ones who did it were once regarded as heroes. But that’s not how I think about Oscar. For many people he’s a monster now. Not for me. Never.’

  Samkelo had suffered as a man born into a black family in South Africa during apartheid’s last days, and he had suffered a great deal personally. He could imagine himself in Pistorius’s mind now, and he felt that whatever he had done that night, it had been less a conscious criminal act than a cruel blow of fortune. His life should be measured in the round, not on the events of a few seconds, Samkelo believed.

  ‘Yes, of course, we must accept the gravity of what he did, but we seem to have forgotten what he has achieved and done for the world. It’s something I don’t think any athlete has ever done. He’s ruined his whole life now, sure. But it’s wrong to define him only by that incident. Even if he is convicted on all charges, it’s wrong!

  ‘Some of my friends say he showed his true colors that night and I say, no, that night his true colors lapsed. Yes, he may have been reckless, but he’s young and we all do crazy things when we are young. If I drive a car and kill someone, it’s not all me, Samkelo. It’s a different me. A stupid, dumb, idiot version of me, maybe, but not the real me. And the man who fired that gun that night is not the true Oscar. If Mandela suddenly woke up and killed someone now, would that erase the fact that he changed the lives of millions for the better? No, it would not. We are too quick to judge.

  ‘Everyone wanted a piece of his story before and now they don’t want it any more. They shun him. But he is the biggest South African hero since Mandela. I don’t care what happens in the trial. It will make no difference to what I feel about him. Whether he is convicted or acquitted, the man’s work from 2004 to 2012 changed my life and, be it accident or intentional, what he did, it’s not going to change the impact he’s had on me, nor the impact he’s had on millions and millions of lives out there. What happened that night cannot obliterate that, as the media are trying to do in South Africa. They build you up, they destroy you. People gloat at his fall, but I am not one of those people. I am on the subjective side. It was my dream for years and years to run with him in front of a big crowd and win gold, and finally it came true. Nothing he’s done will ever erase the person he’s been to me and what he did for me, out of the goodness of his heart. One night does not turn you into a monster.’

  Arnu Fourie would not commit himself any more than Samkelo would, refusing to make a blanket pronouncement on what had happened that night. But he agreed with Samkelo that nothing should erase the past, ‘the good stuff’.

  ‘He did kill someone, it is a fact,’ Arnu said, ‘and a family is bereaved and that is terribly tragic and sad, but nothing can ever take away what he has achieved. It’s horrible how people seem to wish to forget that. The media are seizing on the bad stuff now to confirm the monster image, just as before they looked to confirm the superhero image. All the time now I get stupid phone calls from the very same journalists who a year earlier wanted good stuff, to feed the superhero image. I used to tell them before that the team he led in that relay race in London, we were a brotherhood; that he helped me achieve what I have achieved, opening all the doors for me. Now they don’t want to hear that. They want bad news so they can confirm that he did it. It makes me angry and it makes me sad.’

  Arnu knew him more intimately than Samkelo did, but never went out with him on his nights in Johannesburg. He knew him as a fellow athlete and as a friend who would talk to him about the problems he had with his girlfriends. But he never revealed all, and it was there, in the personal side of life, away from the running track, that Arnu felt he had lacked guidance. ‘He was on stage all the time and it was difficult for him to step off it. What he needed was someone to talk to about normal stuff, love and girlfriends, where the joys and satisfactions in life really are.’

  Arnu said he came to see Pistorius as ‘an ordinary guy’ and, as such, a flawed guy. ‘No one’s perfect. When he’s off the spotlight he is like the rest of us, his dad, his family, you, me – like every other human being. The absurd idea is for people to think that he is perfect. I’d be very disappointed with myself if I were ever to worship another human being.’

  Samkelo harbored no such reservations. Pistorius would remain his hero, irrespective of what came out in court. ‘Even if he is in prison,’ Samkelo said, ‘I shall tell my kids that this was my friend and my role model and he inspired me and the world. He blazed that trail. There is only one Oscar, and that is our Oscar. For me, he is immortal.’

  15

  The terrible thing is that everybody in South Africa has a gun . . . You shouldn’t have those things around because when people get irrational and emotional and drunk, terrible things can happen.

  CHARLIZE THERON, SOUTH AFRICAN ACTRESS

  ‘IAM A black man in a white man’s court,’ Nelson Mandela famously declared at the start of a trial he faced in Pretoria in 1962. More than half a century later, and three months after Mandela’s death, things in South Africa had changed utterly. The country’s most celebrated white man was on trial in a black woman’s court.

  ‘The Matter between the State and Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius’ began, as scheduled, in the High Court of North Gauteng on the morning of March 3, 2014, on the ground floor of a drab, red brick, nine-story building a short walk from the Old Synagogue courthouse where Mandela was tried. The Old Synagogue faced Church Square, the geographical heart of Pretoria, at the center of which there still stood a statue of Paul Kruger, South Africa’s first Afrikaner president, the face of his people’s resistance against the British during the Boer War at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The new High Court building stood on the recently renamed Madiba Street – ‘Madiba’ being the ancestral tribal title by which Mandela was affectionately known to South Africans after he became their country’s first black president.

  Pistorius arrived at the entrance to the court building at nine in the morning. A mob scene greeted him. TV cameramen and photographers battled to get clear shots of him, grunting and cursing as members o
f the general public – so many of them that they spilled from the sidewalk onto the busy road, blocking the rush-hour traffic – jostled with them for a glimpse of the Blade Runner. Drawn and thinner than in his athletic days, he had chosen to wear a dark suit, white shirt and black tie. Whether it was a coincidence or not, it was the very same outfit he had worn on the first night he had gone out on a date with Reeva, to the South African Sports Awards event. Pistorius ran the media gauntlet, escorted by three of Arnold’s sons-in-law, strong, silent men, with whom he lifted weights in the gym and who had made the half-hour trip from Arnold’s home with him in a van. Trauma was written all over Pistorius’s face, but his mind was clearer than when he had appeared before Magistrate Desmond Nair at the bail application hearing five days after the shooting, when the media crush had been just as bad. He had lain not on the floor of a cell the night before but in his own soft bed at the cottage that had been his home since Nair let him out on bail. But he had barely slept. His body’s adrenaline would have to carry him through.

  The judge made her entrance later than expected, at 11.32 in the morning. ‘All rise in court!’ a uniformed policeman cried, a door opened at the back left-hand corner of the chamber, and Thokozile Masipa revealed herself for the first time to the man whose destiny she held in her hands.

  Pistorius was taken aback by how frail she was, startled to see that she walked with far greater difficulty than he did. No taller than he was on his stumps, she limped slightly, her body swaying unsteadily inside a long red robe as she negotiated the three steps up to the raised platform from where she would preside over proceedings. Behind her came two assessors, legal officials she had selected who would sit either side of her throughout the trial ready to dispense advice when she needed it. One was a middle-aged Afrikaans woman called Janet Henzen-du Toit, who had considerable experience as a defense lawyer in criminal cases; the other was Themba Mazibuko, a young, sharp-suited, black legal academic freshly out of university, about whom little was known to either the defense or the prosecution.