But when he went to sleep at night, away from the set-in-concrete smiles, the flashing cameras, and the endless blaring headlines, he must have been all too aware that he was out of his depth when it came to the actual running and that, in waking hours, he was being paraded around like some bionic object with blades, in a macabre freak show.
In his quiet time, he must have been gripped with terror knowing he hadn’t even cracked the basic qualifying time…
In the end I think it all just got out of hand and was way too much for him. Never mind the personal problems he was experiencing with Sammy. The entire thing was crazy.
When he finally ran in the Games, Oscar made it to the semi-finals for the 400 metres, which took place on 4 August. We were terribly excited for him.
But in reality he had little chance against the field with the sprinters Kirani James and Chris Brown from Barbados. (James would win the 400-metre final in an incredible 43:94.) Despite his best effort, Oscar finished right at the back, more than two seconds behind the winner. His dreams of conquering the able-bodied Olympics were over.
Instead of reporting the race as a failure for Oscar, as they would have for any other athlete, the media largely brushed the actual race aside, and instead kept the Oscar illusion going, concentrating on what he had achieved to get this far, rather than the reality that had shown a man clearly out of his depth… No one wanted to say Oscar had failed and had come in stone last; instead reports like this one in the Telegraph focused on Oscar and the feel-good factor. Oscar’s 400-metre endeavour was described as “the soul of London 2012”, by sports writer, Cole Moreton: “If the Games are a celebration of perseverance as well as skill, then what greater triumph of the will can there be than for a man with no legs to run an Olympic race? Particularly when he has been told so often that he never will?”
After competing in the 4x400-metre relay, as part of the South African 4x400-metre team who somewhat miraculously got into the finals after Kenya was disqualified in the semi-finals, the South Africans did not fare well and ended up finishing at the back of the field in 8th place ahead of Cuba, who did not finish. This marked the end of Oscar’s able-bodied Olympic experience.
But what remained in the eyes of the media, as he exited, was a man who had made history as the first double amputee to participate in the Olympic Games. We all acknowledged that achievement but I knew he was disappointed with his performance.
And while other athletes boarded planes and went home as the Olympics ended on 12 August, Oscar was obliged to remain in London for the Paralympics where this time he would not be some token side-show act, but rather the main attraction as the favourite, the defending champion in the 100-metre, 200-metre and 400-metre events. There were huge expectations for him to come home clutching four gold medals.
But it didn’t happen quite as planned and I think the stresses of the Olympics and all his problems with Sam definitely influenced his performance at the Paralympic Games, which kicked off on 29 August, with Oscar leading the South African team, carrying the national flag.
Of course Oscar’s calls and messages to me and the rest of the family had not let up, although by this stage Kerri-Lee and Oscar had had an angry exchange on Twitter, which was later deleted by Oscar.
Oscar had spent hours and hours on the phone with Ke trying to get her advice on how to get Sam back and begging for forgiveness. Ke spent a lot of her energy trying to help him, as we all did. But it really upset her that on one level, while she was spending all hours of the day and night counselling and consoling him, with him promising to change, at the same time, especially on social media like Twitter and Instagram, Oscar was forever encouraging attention from infatuated young and not-so-young women. Kerri was particularly irked by one thirty-something-year-old woman who made it very clear how obsessed she was with Oscar. She tweeted him obsessively and even travelled all the way to London to watch him at the Paralympics, with Oscar encouraging her every step of the way. Ke was outraged that, while he was trying to get back with Sam, and eve after he did get back with her, he made no mention that he had a girlfriend or set any boundaries with his “admirers”.
Never one to mince her words, Ke took him to task publicly on Twitter. She also accused him of having double standards. She told him bluntly that she was sick of his weeping and whinging while he continued to behave badly.
Oscar was furious. Of course he couldn’t see that his behaviour had been in any way inappropriate. Instead of acknowledging any of it, he blocked her from Twitter and stopped calling her. He just cut her dead, with no remorse, no dialogue. In effect, she no longer existed in his world. I found that very telling.
But that didn’t stop him contacting the rest of us; even Sam hadn’t been able to escape his obsessive need for contact.
Going away to Dubai had not in fact helped Sammy at all in terms of getting away from Oscar’s ongoing demands and tormented outbursts. The Internet has made it virtually impossible to escape a person if they want to find you. I think Sammy was really breaking under the strain of it all. There was no way she could make a go out of a new relationship with a new man, however much she liked him, while Oscar was so omnipresent and vocal in her life. He simply would not leave her alone. It was as though he had checkmated her – he had made it totally impossible for her to move forward.
I don’t think Quinton had the slightest clue at the outset what he was getting himself into.
He had no idea about Oscar’s mood swings and what was going on between Oscar in London and the Taylor household during this time. All he knew was that Sammy and Oscar had broken up.
And of course on top of all this, although she had ended it with Oscar, Sam’s feelings towards him were far from resolved; they were complicated and could not simply be erased by ignoring a phone call or a text message.
Sam came straight home from Dubai and a few days later Quinton flew down to the Cape to meet us.
He arrived straight from work at our house, and we all went out for dinner and tried to talk and make some connection, but by the end of the evening I was still filled with conflict and worry as it felt as if I were in the middle of a war zone, with Oscar still phoning me 24/7.
Oscar was now fully aware of what had been going on in Sammy’s life with Quinton and many of his phone calls to me would have him venting his rage against the man who he believed had stolen Sammy’s heart.
Shortly before Oscar got back to South Africa from London, Samantha decided she couldn’t carry on seeing Quinton any more. I was really relieved because, to be honest, there was just too much going on… Quinton and Sam were both very sad. They were really fond of each other, but I think the timing in all of this was terribly wrong. It was all too stressful to start a new relationship at this stage.
Meanwhile back in London, Oscar’s histrionics must have been hell to witness. After a week of sharing a room with Oscar in the Paralympic village in London, teammate Arnu Fourie requested that he be allowed to change rooms as he was finding it hard to focus with all the drama that was unfolding in Oscar’s life. In an article in Vanity Fair published in June 2013, written by Mark Seal, it referred to a radio host interviewing Arnu. Asking him what it was like sharing a room with Oscar, Arnu replied, saying, “I moved out. Oscar is always shouting at people on the phone.”
I can vouch for that. I often used to say to Oscar: Where’s your roommate? Isn’t he sleeping? Aren’t you disturbing him? I know Arnu was a witness to many of these emotionally draining conversations, as sometimes Oscar would say, “Oh, he’s just arrived back,” and then he would carry on crying or ranting as if no one were there.
I often wondered why Arnu didn’t report Oscar’s mental meltdown to the coaches… and tell them that Oscar needed help. But who knows, maybe he did.
By now, it had become clear that Oscar’s emotional state was not only affecting his performance behind the scenes, but also on the track: Oscar seemed to have lost the focus he desperately needed to perform. Instead of winnin
g the T44 200 metres, usually the favourite in that particular event, Oscar was outrun in the last leg of the race by 20-year-old Brazilian Alan Oliveira. We were all horrified as we watched him have a meltdown after the race, caught on camera going off about how Oliveira’s blades were longer than that of the rest of the field, giving him an unfair advantage.
For many people watching around the world, for the first time they saw a side of Oscar that we of course were familiar with, but which most people had never experienced.
But instead of taking him to task for his unsporting behaviour the local and international media, as uncritical as ever of Oscar, ran with headlines like “Oscar in the right lane” and “Oscar to appeal”. It was clear that Oscar could do no wrong in their eyes. Because of his disabilities, it was very hard to ever say a bad thing about Oscar.
I had been guilty of the same overcompensation myself. I remember clearly an incident before the Olympics. One night, actually it was around 3am, while everyone in the house was asleep, I heard footsteps moving around and I immediately recognised Oscar’s movements. I was furious. He had arrived at a ridiculously inappropriate time of the early morning to see my child, instead of showing up on time the night before to take her out. From the sound of things, I could sense he had had too much to drink and was stumbling around. Prior to Oscar we had never been comfortable with boyfriends or girlfriends staying over. After the birthday party in 2011, he just assumed it was okay. It was my fault I guess for not voicing my disapproval from the outset or putting my foot down.
The next morning, I woke up and thought if he’s here I am going to bloody well tell him off… I thought, how dare he not show up, like a normal boyfriend would? How dare he upset her and make her wait for him like she had the night before and not call her, and then just pitch up drunk at a godforsaken time and expect it all to be fine and just stay over?
With all this in mind, I went to the bedroom, and opened the door, but as I looked in, I saw his prosthetic legs lying at the bottom of the bed. I stopped in my tracks. Immediately my anger turned to pity. Everything I had prepared in my head to say to him, all that anger, evaporated.
It was those legs – I felt compassion for Oscar and therefore excused so much of his bad behaviour. Those legs made me treat him differently even though I tried not to. It had nothing to do with him being this famous athlete and celebrity. His not having legs was an extremely powerful component in how I thought about him. One was always sucked in by his disability, by the whole poor Oscar victim thing. The whole of South Africa, the whole world, seemed to have been blindsided into being politically correct around Oscar because of his disability.
But back at the Paralympics, where he was surrounded by people just like him and where he couldn’t play the victim card, Oscar wasn’t finding much joy. In the T44 100-metre final, another race in which he was tipped to win, he was soundly beaten by teenage British sprinter Jonnie Peacock, finishing in a disappointing fourth place. These were both normally Oscar’s sure-win events. I knew how devastated he was after both races.
But at least there was some gold glory for Oscar at the games: the South African relay team, with Arnu Fourie, Samkelo Radebe, Zivan Smith and Oscar, thankfully won the men’s T42-T46 4x100-metre relay and set a new world record of 41:78 seconds. And on the final day of the Games, Oscar won the T44 400 metres in a very impressive 46:68. But overall, that victory was bittersweet and did not make up for all the tears and trauma that had characterised the entire 2012 Olympic experience for Oscar.
It was an emotional moment, watching on television, how a stadium filled with 80 000 people broke into rapturous applause as Oscar, wrapped in a South African flag, did a victory lap. But as always, very few people were aware of the pain behind the mask.
This discrepancy between what the adoring public saw, and what was really going on behind the scenes, was acutely evident on the day that Oscar received his silver medal for the ill-fated Oliveira T44 200-metre event.
Oscar called Kerri-Lee from the Olympic underground train, on the way to the stadium to collect his medal. He was sobbing and sobbing uncontrollably on the phone. The phone call lasted a long time, and he was inconsolable the whole way there. Finally he arrived at the stadium, we could hear them calling his name out on television to receive his medal, but we also knew he was still crying on the phone to Ke. While she was pleading with him to go out there and collect his medal, I went downstairs and stood beside her as she tried to encourage him. It was almost as if he was frozen by deep sadness, probably combined with a good dose of humiliation. The announcer on the TV in the background kept calling his name. It was totally surreal. Then Ke heard voices in the background asking him to come along, and someone else asking if he was okay. At this stage I was really praying that someone there could now see that the wheels had fallen off, and take him to get help.
This was one of the saddest moments we ever experienced with Oscar. But it was actually just symbolic for what had been happening in his life for a very long time.
While everyone had been clapping and cheering for Oscar over the years, the countless red flags indicating all sorts of psychological problems had been continuously ignored and brushed over. From the first emotional outbursts, reckless driving and gun episodes, what appeared to be the speedboat cover-up, the binge drinking, from as early as 2009, evidence had been mounting, indicating that things were not okay.
I kept wondering while I was on the phone to him during and before the Games, trying to encourage him out of his darkness, trying to dissuade him from sabotaging his career, while he wept on the phone with my children, where was his family, his management, his coach in all of this?
Even though he was estranged from his dad and couldn’t call “home”, where were the others?
I know he had flown his beloved gran and siblings over to London to be with him at the Olympics. I honestly thought that once his family had joined him, mentally things would improve and he would settle down and feel supported and loved. I kept encouraging him to reach out and speak to them, call a professional, ask for help, but he never did. I am still amazed that no one on that side picked up on the crisis, that no one saw fit to facilitate some kind of intervention. Maybe they did, but I was unaware of it.
Where was everybody when he was on the phone to us, weeping in the tunnel before the award ceremony to receive the silver medal for the 200-metre race? Why was no one supporting him as he waited to go out in front of a packed Olympic stadium? While we were willing him on, speaking to him on the phone, literally telling him to take a step forward and go out there to receive his medal, why did no one from his camp see the puffy red eyes behind his sunglasses?
When Graeme Joffe repeatedly pointed out that Oscar’s behaviour was inappropriate and problematic, Joffe was immediately accused by his peers of having a personal vendetta against Oscar, and of being unfair. When the sports writer asked uncomfortable questions, no one seemed to be listening.
In numerous publications I read Joffe’s thoughts on how for years Oscar had been showing signs of being in crisis, “So much money was being made from Oscar that it appeared that the people who should have been taking care of Oscar on the mental front had forgotten about that side of the training. Who was preparing his mindset for all the challenges and demands that come with fame and success? I wondered a number of times whether there was any real grooming of Oscar while great things were expected of him.”
With money seeming to obliterate sense, people just kept on turning a blind eye to his issues and covering up for him. It’s amazing how strong an anaesthetic money can be, but it could only hide the pain of the dark truth for so long. The bottom line was by the end of what should have been a legacy of gold and glory, Oscar was a mess.
Tyron, Kerri, Samantha and Greg, road trip, Route 62, 2013.
Names in the sand, 2012.
Tyron and Oscar, Somerset West, September 2012.
Samantha and Oscar, April 2012.
Trish and Samantha, ya
chting, Clifton, Cape Town, 2012.
Sisters Kerri-Lee and Samantha, 2012.
Samantha and Kerri-Lee with cousins Max and Bella, March 2014.
Samantha with a dolphin, Dubai, 2012.
City Press headlines, 9 March 2014.
Saturday Star, 1 March 2014.
City Press, inside, 9 March 2014.
The Star, 6 March 2014.
Oscar holding little Kola, 2012.
Healthy meals MMSed to Oscar during the Olympics, July 2012.
Family and friends gathering, Taylor house, 2013.
Samantha, Seychelles, September 2012.
Beach, Western Cape, 2012.
Oscar and Samantha, Seychelles, 2012.
Oscar and Samantha attend a wedding, Bloemfontein, 2012.
CHAPTER 14
Coming Home
* * *
It’s little wonder that when Oscar arrived at our house in September 2012, after the Games, he was a broken man. Now 15 kilograms lighter, he was a shadow of his usual self, with dark rings haunting his sad eyes, which looked so tired from all the crying. Sammy was just as thin and frail.
We all embraced and then burst into tears as we hugged each other; my heart broke for him. We sat down for dinner and he was very quiet. After the meal he found a quiet space and he and Sammy spent time together chatting upstairs – she was still uncertain whether she was going to give him another chance. In fact she had really not wanted to see him but he told me on the phone that he wasn’t going to take no for an answer and he was coming to see her, no matter what.
Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen Page 12