Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen (3 page)

He demurred, saying he couldn’t come down any earlier, as he had training commitments. It was heart-breaking to hear later that he had had the worst Christmas day ever, all on his own and really missing his mom. He told us that for Christmas lunch he went down to the garage nearby, and bought himself two pies. Sometime later, however, he told us how he had shared Christmas celebrations with his Greek best friend, Alex, and Alex’s family and that they had all had a wonderful day – completely oblivious to the fact that he had told us a completely different story a little while earlier. Incidents like these began to happen more and more often as time went on: Oscar would tell us something that would really tug at our heart strings, and we would find out later that nothing vaguely resembling that tragic story had happened.

It felt like he liked to play the victim when it suited him, while on other occasions he was super capable and seemed to work hard on appearing self-sufficient and heroic.

It’s easy to look back now and see a huge web of contradictions and mind-boggling discrepancies in what he said, but in those early months I recall feeling nothing but love and compassion for Oscar.

He was so easy to talk to, and I often found myself deep in conversation with him, engaging in long chats about a whole range of interesting topics. He always had great stories to tell, especially about funny incidents that took place during his school
days. He once told me about how he loved to paint at school. One story that really made me laugh was how during matric he decided to do some “alterations” on his friend’s artwork – and how his friend was really upset when he discovered Oscar’s handiwork, but forgave him when he actually ended up getting a really good mark on the exam! This was one of the many stories that showed Oscar’s fun, mischievous and adventurous side.

Once, after a trip to Iceland, he came directly from the airport to see Sammy, and showed us all the interesting pictures he’d taken during his trip to see where his blades were made. Because he was on the road a lot, his stories were always fascinating. He was an early riser, like me, and when he spent the night at our house, we would sometimes both be up at dawn having an early-morning chat over a cup of coffee.

Even though some of my early misgivings about Oscar had returned, I still had no idea at that point how terribly fragile Oscar’s rose-tinted bubble was, or that we were all inside it with him. But slowly it became clear to me that his public image was beginning to come apart. The Oscar we were seeing was a far cry from the Oscar his loving fans knew. Over time he revealed himself to be someone quite different from the Oscar we had initially welcomed with such joy into our home.

When Oscar entered our lives, he was already a world-famous celebrity and, I suppose, like so many other people, we were all a bit intrigued by him. At that time, he was universally acknowledged as a hero – from Italy to Tokyo, to Minnesota, a household name in South Africa, a well-known figure around the world… He was probably the South African closest to being as recognisable internationally as our beloved political icon, Nelson Mandela, who was universally revered for resisting apartheid and for helping our country make a peaceful transition to a fully democratic state in 1994.

In the eyes of the media both locally and abroad, Oscar fitted the profile of heroic underdog perfectly, and could do no wrong. I guess in some way we all internalised that image of him – the inspirational hero who, despite life-challenging disabilities, conquers all. That’s pretty much the way I saw him when he first entered our family circle back in 2011. Although I soon came to regard him as my third son, it was always there – his public persona: Oscar the athlete, Oscar the hero.

If there is anything I have learnt in these past few years, it’s how powerful the media are and how strongly they can influence our perceptions. I think if Oscar had just been some normal, talented, able-bodied, athlete, we would all have responded very differently
to him. The fact that he was a young double amputee, who had gone through untold challenges to conquer his disabilities, made the whole world embrace him and draw him close, including our own little family.

But Oscar took it one step further when he became a champion for all disabled athletes, by challenging a decision that had been taken by the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) in March 2007. At a meeting in Mombasa, Kenya, a decision was made by the IAAF prohibiting all athletes from using “any technical devices, designed to improve performances” from participating in official races.

Oscar and his famous Cheetah carbon blades were considered to fall under this ruling. That prevented him, after posting impressive times in “normal” competitions, from participating in able-bodied athletics races. Four months later, Oscar would make history when he competed in the Golden Gala Event, an able-bodied athletics meeting in Rome (the organisers had flouted the IAAF ruling). Coming from behind, due to a slowish start, Oscar managed to finish second overall, posting an impressive time of 46:90. But more importantly, he made history as the first disabled athlete to compete alongside able-bodied athletes at an international level. I was in awe when I found out how much he was doing on behalf of all disabled athletes.

Now Oscar set about overturning the IAAF ruling, but the road was long and filled with disappointments. Over the following months he would first have to endure a string of tests put together by the IAAF that were often physically draining and at times humiliating, resembling what he described in interviews as “a circus-like atmosphere” that involved teams of doctors, scientists, technicians and photographers. Oscar’s morale was at an all-time low after the results of the tests were released, stating that his blades gave him an unfair advantage over able-bodied athletes because they gave him the ability to compete on the same level but without expending as much energy. He was subsequently banned from participating in able-bodied events.

Driven to succeed, Oscar decided to challenge the decision and
went to work on undergoing a new set of tests in Maine and Houston in the US to disprove the IAAF’s findings. After just under four gruelling months, on 16 May 2008, Oscar was in Milan when he learnt that his appeal to overturn the IAAF ban in a court in Lucerne, Switzerland, had been successful. The ruling found that his blades gave him no distinct technical advantage over those running without prosthetics. This legal finding finally allowed him to participate in “normal” athletics meetings. Oscar had emerged victorious and the world regarded him as a true champion for the disabled, and awarded him an almost superhero status in South Africa.

I think it must have been easy for Oscar himself to believe what was being said about him in the press and to become accustomed to the hype and adulation that surrounded him. In some way we were all complicit in encouraging him to believe in his own myth. We needed a hero and he was willing to be just that.

In 2008, the same year as the Lucerne ruling, an Italian journalist, Gianni Merlo, penned Oscar’s biography,
Dream Runner
. In 2009 the English version
Blade Runner
was released, and then, to coincide with the London Olympics, a revised edition was released in July 2012. The book helped to further burnish Oscar’s now near-mythical status. It alluded to the playful, charming and mischievous side of Oscar without a single hint that Oscar might have a string of behavioural problems, such as issues with anger.

The book’s back jacket describes Merlo’s account as:

Ever since I can remember, I have been interested in how the human psyche works. When I was a psychology student, I read the works of Carl Jung, which were written more than half a century ago, but which continue to be relevant, with useful insights. Jung writes about how all of us collectively inherit ideas and thoughts in the unconscious realm – images or ideas he called “archetypes”. He narrowed these down into 12 archetypes, which are really the wisdom culled from human experiences and perceptions common to all humankind from time immemorial.

I was especially drawn to the insights Carl Jung had on “the Hero vs the Shadow” archetype.

When it came to trying to understand Oscar, this archetype began to make perfect sense. According to Jung, the Hero, also known as the warrior, crusader, soldier, dragon slayer and winner, must at all costs prove his worthiness through courageous acts. His greatest fear is weakness or vulnerability and he strives, despite all obstacles, to be as strong and competent as possible. Oscar, in his “perfect” form, seemed to fit this archetype to a T.

On the flip side of the Hero, Jung suggested, lay the Shadow, embodying the compensating values to those found in the conscious personality. The shadow is often linked to the dark side, the parts of the person that are suppressed and hidden, the pushed-down feelings and ideas that are never expressed. Today when I think about Oscar the Hero vs Oscar the Shadow I get cold shivers. How easily he seemed to switch between these opposing descriptions.

A man’s reputation goes before him and Oscar’s quasi-iconic one definitely was a huge factor in the way we as a family initially responded to him. In fact, when I look back, his hero status at first prevented me and the rest of my family from seeing him as he was – we just didn’t consider that the Oscar who had entered our lives was not the one we had read about in the media. And denial, of course, is a powerful human deterrent to seeing the truth.

But not everyone shared this rose-tinted view. In the early days of Sam and Oscar’s relationship, sometime in November, 2011, soon after Samantha brought him home, a friend of hers was visiting and one of us mentioned Oscar’s name. “Watch out,
Samantha, he’s not what he seems…” The words had hardly left her mouth and we were all leaping to his defence. He was crazy about Sammy. The girl surely must have been mistaken.

Looking back now, I see how we were all totally taken in by the fantasy perpetuated by the media. None of us wanted to see Oscar’s dark side. And because Oscar believed so strongly in his own image, we did too.

It was only much later that I finally faced the truth of just how at war his two sides really were with each other… The Hero, the one we all loved and admired… and the Dark One, the Shadow, the one he worked so hard to suppress, the side of him that was unheroic, needy and wholly imperfect.

When I finally had this epiphany, it was like waking up one morning to see the whole world had physically shifted and changed overnight. I imagine people who endure physical disasters like tsunamis and hurricanes must feel something similar.

Not being able to talk to anyone about it, especially not to Sammy for fear of upsetting her, and risking estrangement from her if I told her my fears about Oscar, I suppose I resorted to doing what I knew best… I tried to mother Oscar, keep him close and in the process got to know the Oscar who seldom appeared in public. He became like a troubled son.

One reason Oscar and I established such an immediate and intense bond, I believe, is because my mothering instincts are so strong and Oscar’s need for mothering is so huge. It was like a magnetic effect – both of us fulfilling a need in the other.

From the time he was born right until the day she died, Oscar had an unusually close relationship with his own mother, Sheila. It seemed to me as if, several years after her death, Oscar found in me some type of comfort, a sort of a replacement maternal figure.

Long before I met Oscar I remember being moved by his heartbreaking story. There had been so much written about him, this tiny baby who had been born with no fibular bones in his legs, and who went on to become the unimaginable – a world-champion athlete.

The medical term for his condition was known as fibular hemimelia, a very rare condition characterised by an absence of the fibula bone – the bone between the ankle and knee, alongside the tibia – in one or both legs.

It must have been so hard for his parents when faced with what to do in their infant son’s best interest.

Confronted by an enormous dilemma, Oscar’s parents decided to follow expert advice, and when he was just 11 months, both of Oscar’s lower legs were amputated. I can’t imagine what I would have done if I had been forced to make such a drastic decision for one of my children.

I was amply aware of what it was like to suffer the amputation of a limb. Almost uncannily, two members of my own family had suffered the same fate. My grandfather, a very sporty man who was a Springbok gymnast, and who played tennis well into his nineties, was forced, at the end of his life, to have one of his legs amputated after he injured it. I have vague memories of how badly this affected him both mentally and emotionally, and he passed away not long after that.

Later, my father, a highly successful businessman and avid sportsman, had to endure the same fate after he got gangrene in his leg, and had to have it amputated.

It was heart-wrenching to watch my father’s decline. From a large-living, successful man he shrank in size and stature, bound to a wheelchair, trapped in a home, doing nothing but crosswords all day long.

In Oscar’s case, he would often tell us that it was his mom, Sheila, who was his source of strength from the outset, after his amputation, who worked hard to give him tools to help him confront and overcome his handicap. From an early age, Sheila taught her son that being born with no fibular bones was just a slight detour in life and that when it came to realising his dreams, anything was possible.

Just before he underwent a bilateral amputation, his mother wrote him a letter… words that have often been quoted by Oscar and journalists worldwide in the hundreds of stories written about the sports hero.

As a result of his mother’s unwavering belief in her disabled son, Oscar was brought up to believe he was no different to anyone else, despite being born with a condition that set him apart from nearly everyone.

When his parents divorced, Oscar, then just six, continued to live with his mom, along with his brother Carl and sister Aimee. From the huge, wide-open spaces he was used to in his parents’ former home, Oscar and his siblings moved to a much smaller environment, closer to Pretoria. It must have been a difficult change for all of them.

After some time, I began to realise that Oscar was a closed book when it came to certain aspects of his life. He never really spoke of the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, although he did once mention that it was “hard to speak about the things he had witnessed between his parents as a child”. Who knows what he experienced growing up, or what he was exposed to that might have scarred his psyche or have influenced his actions and outlook later. But what he did like to mention, often both publicly and privately, was what a positive force his mom was in his life. It was very clear that she had done everything she could to focus always on his abilities, never on his disabilities. In
Blade Runner
, he observed: “I have always wanted to participate and compete. I wanted to run, to swim, to play cricket and rugby, to drive a car and of course a motorbike. I have always wanted to live life normally… I don’t think of myself as disabled. I have limits but we all have limits and like anyone else I also have many talents.”

I believe that inability to ever admit he was disabled was in fact one of Oscar’s underlying problems. He would compare himself only to able-bodied athletes and put incredible pressure on himself by trying to compete at that level, instead of trying to be the very best disabled person that he could be. While that refusal to compromise made him a hero, it also created inhuman levels of stress, constantly pushing him to the breaking point.

But, while his mother was kind, encouraging, loving and gentle, his father Henke chose to adopt somewhat different tactics as a parent. Afraid that Oscar might not cope later in life because of his
physical disadvantages, he tried at every opportunity to toughen his son up in preparation for the world he would one day have to face. By all accounts Henke was a harsh disciplinarian. And as time went on, son and father became estranged.

I can’t remember Oscar ever speaking about what must have been the singular most painful event in his childhood, the unexpected death of his beloved mother. I knew from reports and reading that she had become seriously and unexpectedly ill in 2002. Oscar was just 15 at the time, a boarder at the highly prestigious sport-mad school, Pretoria Boys High when his mom suddenly fell ill and was hospitalised. The doctors could not find what was wrong with her, and because her son Carl had recently contracted hepatitis, Sheila was misdiagnosed and treated for the same illness. By the time the doctors realised their mistake, it was too late. Within a month, on 6 March 2002, Sheila Pistorius was dead.

It’s clear from reading his account in
Blade Runner
, Oscar and his siblings were devastated. His mother had been Oscar’s main support, the centre of his world, and without any real warning she was cruelly ripped from his life. The shock and trauma must have been enormous. Without the woman who had refused to let him think of himself as different or disabled, who had encouraged him every tiny, painful step of the way, to be special and excel always, he was lost and stricken with deep and inconsolable grief.

Now rudderless, having totally lost his bearings after his mother’s death, he regularly found himself in a flood of uncontrollable tears. I would witness that deep, wracking sobbing a number of times during the time Oscar inhabited our world.

Still a child really, at an age of great vulnerability and emotion, it must have cut deep scars into his psyche. In
Blade Runner
, Oscar noted how his older brother Carl, whom he had always relied on and been close to, now seemed to disappear. Overwhelmed by guilt, Carl blamed himself for their mother’s death because he had likened his hepatitis symptoms to his mother’s – and he was convinced he had steered the doctors to a diagnosis in the wrong direction. Oscar described how they became estranged as Carl coped with his mother’s death by losing himself in drinking and fast cars.

Oscar’s reaction to the loss was different. Sport was his only escape. Rugby seemed to be the one activity that provided distraction from the grief that all but paralysed him during the long, dark period after his mother’s death.

But in June 2003, just over a year after his mother’s death, 16-year-old Oscar suffered a serious injury to his knee, playing in a fiercely contested school rugby match at Pretoria Boys High. It looked like his schoolboy sporting days were over. After three months of intense physiotherapy at the University of Pretoria’s Sports Science Institute, under the watchful eye of Heinrich Nolte, he was advised to start sprinting as part of the rehabilitation process. This would help to build up muscular strength and stamina. Oscar was now introduced to university coach Ampie Louw, who was retained to oversee his training. Reluctant at first, Oscar finally acquiesced and formally began training with Ampie on 1 January 2004. But he had no intention of running other than to ready himself for the next school rugby season. Little did he know how this switch would change his world.

Four weeks into his training on 28 January he took part in his first official 100-metre race, at a school athletics meeting in Bloemfontein, a town in one of South Africa’s nine provinces, the Free State.

Not only did he win the race but he did it in a Paralympian world record-breaking time of 11:72. The previous record was 12:20 – in his first ever race at just 17 Oscar had become a world champion and broken the previous record by an incredible 48 seconds. My mind still boggles at the enormity of that!

Within a month he had broken his own record and run at 11:51. Life changed for Oscar literally overnight. Next, he competed in the South African Disabled Games, although in
Blade Runner
he spoke about feeling estranged and not fitting into the whole disabled scene. That’s possibly why he went to such efforts later to find a way to compete in the able-bodied athletics arena.

Now after just eight months of competing in athletics, Oscar was informed that he would be part of the South African team at the Athens 2004 Paralympics, to be held between 13 and 29
August. The world watched as Oscar was catapulted into the record books, setting a new 200-metre world record in the T44 class of 21:97 and winning a bronze in the highly contested 100 metres. Oscar was still just 17.

When I met Oscar I was immediately intrigued by the inkings he had. In fact one of the first things I asked him was what the numbers on his inner right arm meant, “LVIII V VIII – II III VI”. He immediately closed up and then got quite emotional and told me that it was his mom’s birth date and the date that she passed away: 8 May 1958 – 6 March 2002. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it.

The story behind the tattoo on his back has often been quoted in the media.

In 2011, while staying in a hotel in Soho in New York, late one night, he was suffering from jet lag and couldn’t sleep and so found himself wandering around the streets of New York. He walked into an all-night tattoo parlour and asked the Puerto Rican tattoo artist to ink the biblical verse from 1 Corinthians 9:26–27: “I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. I execute each strike with intent. I beat my body and make it my slave…” Apparently it took from 2am to about 8:30am. I found it hilarious when Oscar explained it was squiggly because the guy was half asleep when he did it. It was one of the stories he loved to tell.

After the Athens Olympics, he dedicated all his subsequent victories to his mother. Her words of encouragement became his inner mantra.

In some ways I began to take on some kind of maternal replacement role during the Olympics in 2012, when most of my letters and emails to him were filled with words of encouragement and meditations to inspire and encourage him out of the dark space he was in.

Soon after Oscar came into our lives, I had a dream one night that his mom wanted to tell me something. It felt really urgent, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It seemed to go on and on but it never felt any clearer. I remember waking up and feeling disturbed
by it, the way only dreams can make you feel. When I told Oscar about the dream I described the woman in my dreams to him – she had long dark hair and was wearing denim shorts. Then he showed me the pic of his mom on his phone – the picture he carried around with him. It was amazing how similar the woman in my dream was to the photograph. We hardly ever spoke of her again.

There was so much about Oscar that we didn’t know about, which was hidden. I was really surprised, for instance, when I read in
Blade Runner
that his mom had remarried after her divorce from his father – he never mentioned that to me, which I did find odd.

I also sensed that he had elevated his mom to an almost saintly space in his psyche.

In press and television interviews he invariably referred to the influence his mother had had on his life and outlook. At the high-profile London Olympics press conferences, he often described his mom as: “very cool; a very hectic, free spirit. She didn’t really comply with much and had a very carefree approach to life.” And: “She didn’t take anything too seriously. She wrote us hundreds of letters and taught us hundreds of things and never made decisions for us.”

After making history as the first double amputee to compete in the Olympic Games in London in 2012, and after qualifying for the semi-finals of the 400 metres, he paid tribute to his mother, again.

“I thought about my mother a lot today. She was a bit of a hard-core person. She didn’t take no for an answer.”

I often wondered what effect her untimely and shocking death had on him and his future relationships.

One morning in early 2012 when I got up pre-dawn at some ungodly hour, I saw Oscar standing on our landing and staring out the window into thin air.

He looked so alone, such a sad, solitary figure. Every part of me just wanted to move closer and give him a hug. But he seemed so far away, so closed off and unapproachable, so I refrained. It was almost as if he were bionic, a machine who came from some other planet. He always seemed to be working so damn hard at being “normal” and making sure that everything looked “right”. I
thought that if I approached and hugged him, by engaging in such a simple human gesture, I would disempower him. So I chose not to follow my impulse.

We went downstairs instead and shared a cup of coffee. This was some time before the Olympics.

Months later, in one of his many distressed phone calls to me – when he was sobbing uncontrollably and desperately unhappy in September 2012 – I told him how on that day I had wanted to give him a big hug, to make him feel better. He seemed genuinely moved and asked me why I hadn’t, and said that he wished I had.

I tried to explain to him how difficult it had felt on that early morning to reach out to him. That he had seemed so impenetrable that it had been impossible for me to fulfil the gesture. I explained to him that it was very difficult, as a mother who was used to looking after everyone and making sure that everyone was okay, to do the same with him. I told him that while he was working so hard at not being vulnerable and making everyone think that all was in order in his world, he was really robbing himself of love. And that if he was honest with himself, he would be able to admit that all he really wanted, what he craved, was for people to love and care for him. That, after all was said and done, all he wanted was a family. And that, I suppose, is where we willingly came into the picture.