Agence France-Presse
Johannesburg, July 6: At the 2012 London Olympics, before 80,000 roaring fans and a constellation of camera flashes, it took Oscar Pistorius 45.44 seconds to become a global icon.
His sprint around the 400m track was the first time in history that a double-amputee had raced at the Olympic Games. The race capped an Olympian triumph over adversity for Pistorius. His journey from disabled child to world-class athlete seemed to embody the very best of sporting endeavour and the human spirit.
Then on Valentine’s Day in 2013 his achievements were just as quickly demolished when in the early hours he shot and killed his 29-year-old girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
At his trial in 2014, he sat for months in a windowless courtroom, and watched as his world was washed away. His sparkling career was cut short, sponsors dumped him and he was forced to sell his homes amid mounting legal bills.
The ‘Blade Runner’ – an epithet earned for his trademark prosthetic legs that powered him to fame as a Paralympic gold medallist — became the ‘Blade Gunner’. “He’s not only broke, but he is broken, there is nothing left,” lawyer Barry Roux told last month.
Time and again during his trial, the court was told about ‘two Oscars’ – one a hero, the other a victim. But the high-profile proceedings also exposed the 29-year-old’s darker side: offering glimpses of a dangerously volatile man with a penchant for guns, beautiful women and fast cars. “Oscar is certainly not what people think he is,” ex-lover and trial witness Samantha Taylor stated during the trial.
In 2004, just eight months after taking to the track, he smashed the 200m world record at the Athens Paralympics. Next up was the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games where he took the 100m, 200m and 400m sprint titles and launched a battle to take part in able-bodied athletics. In 2011 he made history by becoming the first amputee to run at the World Championships, where he took a silver in the relay event.
“He is the definition of global inspiration,” ‘Time’ magazine proclaimed in its 2012 list of the world’s most influential people. Less than a year later, Pistorius featured on the cover with the words, ‘Man, Superman, Gunman’.