Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen
Page 11
I have always believed it takes great nobility and real courage to open up and confront one’s demons. In his letter it looked like this was exactly what Oscar was doing. I wanted to reach out to him, embrace him and forgive him as soon as I had finished reading it. I hoped it would have the same effect on Sam too. I emailed him back about two hours later:
From: Trish Taylor
Subject: Re: Oscar
Date: 18 July 2012 6:22:15 PM SAST
To: Oscar Pistorius
Dear Oz
Thank you for your truly honest letter, it really must have taken a lot to write it, and I appreciate you sharing.
I feel as if I have been living in a really sad movie in the past couple of days, and feel absolutely drained. I think the saddest thing for me is that you guys are amazing together, you have an almost mental telepathy with each other, and something so beautiful has ended up in such a bad space. But I think it is time to move on from the past and move forward.
I love this saying – The past is forever gone & the future is not yet, so for Now we are free from both.
I have always drummed it into my kids’ heads to live their lives with honesty and integrity, and I always do my best to live my life like this as well.
I know that I feel a lot better after reading this letter and I am sure Sammy does as well. And if nothing else out of all this sad drama, if you guys stay together, which I really hope you do. I think so many honest things have been said between all of us that it will create an amazing future to your relationship. Remember to keep the communication going – oh and you are welcome to give me honest criticism at any time – I am feeling really bad as I send off my messages to you (I think it is my psychology background rearing its head), as I have been trying to guide you, and am so grateful that you have taken them in the way that they were intended, and I so admire you for doing this.
I think as I reply to your email, and going to reply to points that you have made honestly
Firstly, I accept your apologies
I understand the self sabotage thing, but don’t do it – you need to get out of the cycle now, even if you go for counselling. Every single thing that you have, including love and respect, you have earned and you deserve.
My first impression of you was great, I had no preconceptions, and I honestly met you and thought what a genuinely nice guy. You were easy to chat to and I really liked you (I still do, a lot).
I think more than anything Sammy will appreciate your honesty about Jenna, and thank you for letting her know.
Oz, I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like losing your mom at such a young age, especially as she was such an amazing lady. I lost my mom when I was 37 and not a day goes by when I don’t miss and think about her.
I met a young lady the other day who went to the school where your mom was the secretary, and she told me how amazing your mom was to her – this girl didn’t have a mom, and your mom took her under her wing. She says if you ever want to chat about your mom, she would love to as she still thinks about her often.
I understand how you have worked so hard to get to where you are now in your career and you have made history, which is absolutely amazing, and I can understand how you tried to protect yourself emotionally, but once again this [is] only stepping back and you need to move on.
As a mom, I am so incredibly proud of my family, and so emotionally attached that I probably feel too much for kids, but more than anything I wanted them to grow up with a close bond. And you and your brother and sister are so lucky to have your close bonds. I must say there have been moments when you have been here and I have wanted to mother you and look after you and sometimes advise you, and I have held myself back. I am sorry now in some ways that I didn’t, as maybe some of my advice would have been beneficial. You are also so powerful and successful and I never wanted to undermine that.
Just stay positive right now and focus – everything that you have worked for is so close.
Lots of love
Trish
Oscar’s letter would be of critical significance regarding things that would happen in our lives. It felt monumental, and primarily because of its apparent honesty, it was the key factor in getting Sammy and Oscar to reunite.
However it did not have the immediate results Oscar was hoping for. Despite his efforts to be open and transparent in the hope of getting Sammy to change her mind and forgive him, my daughter was not immediately swayed and was still intent on trying to forget about Oscar and move on.
At one stage when Sam was still adamant that she did not want to go back to him, even after countless calls and emails, he told me how angry he was that he had wasted over R80 000 on phoning our family. I remember being surprised. Considering all the international calls that we received from him, I would have thought it was a lot more.
On the home front, although I had done everything in my power to try to persuade Sammy to postpone her trip with Quinton to Dubai, knowing how fragile Oscar was, I also knew how broken she was and how much she needed to find some peace and distance.
With Sammy refusing to engage with Oscar while she was away, I became more and more of the go -etween, responding on Sammy’s behalf. It was an insane situation to be in, but I was terrified that Oscar was going to resort to doing something drastic, like pull out of the Games or disappear. I even thought he might kill himself.
From: Trish Taylor
Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2012 08:16:35
To: Oscar Pistorius
Subject: Fwd:
Dear Oz
I am so pleased to hear that you are training hard, and you seem to be surrounded by really positive people. At least this will help you get your heart and soul back into the game. I can imagine that you are still hurting so badly, and it must be really tough.
I thought Sammy was getting back this morning, but she only gets back tonight, and she SMS’d me last night to say that she wants to come straight home when she gets back. I can’t wait for her to get home, and then I will sit and have a chat with her.
I still honestly pray that she comes over for all the reasons that we have discussed, for the sake of both of you. But I am going to leave it up to her to make the decision. Because at the end of the day it is between you and her.
I am going to get hold of the Visa place now, to see how quickly they can arrange a visa if need be.
It has been a tough couple of weeks for everyone, and I still feel very heartsore, so we now have to pray that whatever the outcome is, will ultimately be the best for both of you.
Please remember that I am here to give you support if you ever need it, as I really care very much about you.
Hope you have an amazing day
Lots of love
Trish
The quote below is so true
“Love is like the truth, sometimes it prevails, and sometimes it hurts.” – Victor M. Garcia Jr.
Here are some quotes to motivate you for today
Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain. – Author unknown
Stubbornly persist, and you will find that the limits of your stubbornness go well beyond the stubbornness of your limits. – Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
Don’t be discouraged. It’s often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock. – Author unknown
If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking. – Buddhist saying
I may not be there yet, but I’m closer than I was yesterday. – Author unknown
Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines. – Robert Schuller
I hoped these words would help Oscar. I knew how much more help and support he needed than little paragraphs and links to inspirational websites, but what could I do, thousands of miles away? All I could hope for was that somehow, knowing that somewhere out there someone cared, that would be enough to help him
through dark days.
On 30 Jul 2012, at 10:56 AM, Oscar Pistorius wrote:
Hi Trish,
Thank you very much for the email.
I have been out in Twickenham with the athletics team, we only move into the village later today but some of my old school friends came to visit me yesterday afternoon after training which was a blessing.
She sent me a message this morning saying that she is coming back today too. I think that’s best. This [sic] past two weeks hasn’t been easy on her. I just don’t think there is anymore I can say to her and at the end of the day she needs to do what makes her heart happy. Thank you for all the messages of support and for the encouragement, guidance and clarity you have given me these last days.
I miss Sam very much, I care about her terribly too. I’m finding it hard not knowing how she is or what she has been up too [sic] or who she was with. I want and need her in my life and I’m trying to keep hope that she feels the same because it doesn’t feel like it anymore. I have myself to blame for most of it but I still feel like it [sic] we have an unbelievable bond and if we can’t get through this after everything and all this time apart it would be very sad.
I hope you have a blessed day.
Love Oscar
If by some miracle she changes her mind and decides she wants to talk to me and we can sort out what’s between us and she wants to be part of this time in my life then I can call the consulate in Pretoria and see what they can do.
From: Trish Taylor
Subject: Re:
Date: 30 July 2012 11:16:45 AM SAST
To: Oscar Pistorius
Hi Oz
I agree, I don’t think there is any more to say now, I think she must just have her space to think when she gets back today.
We will keep you posted, later.
I don’t know whether you have ever been onto this website – but if you go through it – there are some very calming meditations on it – worth have a look at, www.thereisaway.org
Hope you have a stunning day
Lots of love
Trish
xxx
And so it went on, with me trying to keep things light and chatty and positive. I had resorted to doing what I knew best; I tried to mother him, sending Oz little lines of hope, links to meditations, willing him on towards the huge event that lay looming like some huge threatening black cloud on the horizon.
CHAPTER 13
On Shaky Ground
* * *
The thing is, Oscar should never have actually been at the Olympics. Or at least not at the able-bodied Games between 27 July and 12 August. As much as we all wanted him to be there, as much as we were all rooting for him, he didn’t actually fulfil the criteria to qualify for the South African team. That was the hard truth but no one seemed to notice.
Required to run two A times per event (10:18secs in the 100 metres and 20:55secs in the 200 metres) we were all aware in the months leading up to the Games how hard he was trying to achieve this. By the time selection was finalised, however, Oscar had only managed to crack the prerequisite time once. In any other athlete’s case, they would simply not have been allowed to take part. When it came to Oscar, the wonder boy with no legs who had managed to beat all sorts of debilitating odds, the rules were different.
In the local media, there were only a few journalists who were prepared to stick their necks out to write the truth about the whole saga. Well-known sports journalist Graeme Joffe was one of them. But generally, right up until Reeva’s death, critics were few and far between. In Graeme Joffe’s case he paid dearly for his outspokenness: these days he’s a freelancer, largely isolated from the mainstream press. He faces mounting legal bills, according to reports I read recently, because he is being sued for R21 million by SASCOC for allegedly insulting them.
In numerous blogs and articles Joffe wrote on the “Oscar at the Olympics” saga, his opinion is that money must have changed hands between certain parties at some point, due to big sponsorship deals riding on Oscar showing up at the Olympics. Additionally he quoted the sports minister, Fikile Mbalula, who on the eve of Olympics, said, “Oscar Pistorius was a political selection.”
I think one of the saddest consequences of Oscar’s inclusion at the Games was that there was no space for the very talented 27-year-old sprint champion, Simon Magakwe, an African champion and holder of both the 100-metre and 200-metre records, to be included on the team. He had easily qualified ahead of Oscar, posting six A-qualifying times as opposed to Oscar’s one. In fact Magakwe beat the 100-metre qualifying time with a national record, including a 10:06sec race, which equalled the national record and the 200-metre criterion twice. My heart broke for him when I read about his shock and sadness when he realised he had been left out of the South African team in favour of Oscar. He had been training for London for four years. When he realised Oscar would go to London instead of him, he told a local newspaper, “I feel very sad and hurt because [if I had been chosen] I was not going to have problems financially and I would have been able to prepare for any competition without worrying about what my family was going to eat.”
Besides the obvious financial implications I think the saddest thing is that it’s highly unlikely that Magakwe will get another shot at the Olympics in 2016. His chance for his moment in the sun is over.
In February 2013 I watched a television programme on the South African investigative show Carte Blanche that showed Athletic South Africa (ASA) board member and former sprint champion, Geraldine Pillay, backing Graeme Joffe’s allegations that Oscar had received preferential treatment, when included in the national Olympic athletic team, even though he failed to fulfil the Olympic qualifying criteria. On the show, Pillay said: “SASCOC should have applied their standards, which they have set, to everybody across the board, regardless of who you are, regardless of your profile.” Like Joffe, Pillay’s voice was a lone one in the midst of a very Oscar-friendly media. Very few journalists or media houses were prepared to stick their necks out and say anything that questioned the Oscar Illusion.
Graeme Joffe put the blame squarely at the door of the local media for many of the Oscar cover-ups, saying, “The local media are hugely responsible here for not telling the truth or looking for the other, darker side of Oscar. The thing is, a lot of sports journos in this country become fans and not journos. Guys go to players’ weddings, they tweet about their ‘chinas’ [friends], they get taken on five-star, all-expenses-paid world trips… there’s no investigative incentive ’cos everyone is keeping each other sweet.”
Any local journalist who crossed Oscar often found themselves noted in his black little book as “unfriendly media”. In the February 2013 issue of Sarie, a top-selling woman’s magazine in South Africa, Oscar, who was on the cover with his sister Aimee, said when it came to the media in South Africa, “There’s little consideration for the truth. I don’t really do interviews in South Africa… If someone writes something about me that’s not true, [i.e., negative] I just open my little [black] book and make notes… I know how much time I give to humanitarian work, how much to the people that are close to me. I know what kind of person I am. I don’t need to validate myself every five minutes.”
By the time Oscar got to London there was so much hype about him being there, nobody was asking the question: should he actually be here? Wherever we looked, whether it was on television on Sky, on CNN, in the newspapers or on the Internet, it seemed Oscar was everywhere. No one was saying anything vaguely critical, but rather it was all about heaping praise on Oscar.
Dubbed the “Oscar Olympics”, the events in London were hyped as a square-off between Usain Bolt and Oscar Pistorius. Both the local and the international media were hungry for a story and fed on the Oscar feel-good fable at every opportunity. I don’t think this helped Oscar’s state of mind on any level. On the one hand it was putting all this pressure and expectation on him and on the other it was feeding into the whole idea that he was special and beyond scrutiny. It definitel
y fed into his distorted idea of his own power and lack of accountability.
It was quite plain to see that Oscar’s presence at the London Olympics 2012 was all about fulfilling a gigantic marketing dream, embracing the symbol of a boy who was born with no fibular bones, a double amputee who beat the odds and got the chance to reach for mainstream gold glory.
Long before the Olympics started, Nike had built a huge iconic cut-out of Oscar in London. It was as though it had been decided that whether he qualified or not, Oscar was going to be there. The idea had taken on a life of its own; the monster marketing money machine wanted him to be there in all its glory and so Oscar had no choice but to pitch up in his prosthetic blades and keep the illusion going.
But late at night when no one was watching, and behind the scenes, he was Oscar the disabled athlete, the guy who had bleeding, chafed stumps when the blades got taken off, the guy who seemed to have no one leading or guiding him.
The pressure on him seemed to come from everywhere, the sponsors, the athletic and Olympic bodies, the South African sports department, his fans, but most of all I think he took on all these expectations inwardly, and exerted gigantic pressure on himself. There he was, a tiny cog in a hungry machine, portraying this carefully constructed image: Oscar, the boy with no legs, who had beaten all the odds and become the poster boy for the Olympics in carbon-fibre blades, alongside Usain Bolt, the fastest man alive. He had to keep it intact at all costs. Imagine the pressure to perform.