Chase Your Shadow (19 page)

‘I want to get Oscar these,’ Herr said, apparently not having considered the possibility that in the event of Pistorius going to prison, such artifacts would probably be prohibited, regarded as potentially lethal weapons. There was nothing the brilliant professor could do to help him now, but back in early 2008 his capacious scientific mind was exactly what the athlete had needed. The scientific challenge appealed to Herr – as, perhaps, did the publicity that the association with Pistorius would give him. But there was also a personal motive behind his decision to enlist, free of charge, in the Pistorius cause.
At first sight, Herr came across as dispassionate, but there was a moral principle at play here, one in which he had a fierce emotional stake.

‘It was obvious as light that there was discrimination,’ Herr said. ‘It was the very same bias we’ve seen against women, gays, blacks.’ To him, it became clear once he began to delve into the history of Pistorius’s IAAF ban that prejudice was the starting point and scientific reasoning only came later. As with most prejudices – not least those that used to drive the apartheid system in South Africa – the underpinning, Herr believed, was fear. ‘They said they wanted to preserve the purity of the sport, but the truth was,’ he said, ‘that they felt threatened.’

The threat was a vision of the future that thrilled Herr as much as it would appall the athletics federation.

‘Before the end of the century we will have a bionic leg that is faster than a biological leg. No doubt,’ Herr said. ‘That means the Olympics will be a celebration of natural bodies while the Paralympics will be more a celebration of a human machine in action, like a driver and racing car at Daytona. This leg you see me wearing today will be obsolete in a few years. We won’t use this piece of crap. Before the century is out, Paralympic athletes will far exceed the capacity of Olympic athletes and will draw far greater crowds. They will be jumping so much higher, running so much faster, that watching the natural bodies compete in the Olympics will seem boring by comparison.’

Warming to his theme, offering a glimpse of the pride he felt in his own story of redemption, Herr continued, ‘I lost my legs, but now I climb better than people with biological legs and I am regarded as a threat, like Oscar. That was why they shunned him and tried to stop him participating. They see in him a frightening vision of obsolescence, and all the more so because people like me and him come out of our experiences stronger than hell, armed with far greater psychological reserves.’

Herr might not have made that point had he any notion of the tangles Pistorius would get himself into with women, or of the desperate fragility he had exhibited to the world. The Pistorius that Herr had met back in 2008 was as impressively steadfast in adversity as he was himself. Pistorius had also struck Herr as kind and gentle, he said. His reaction to the news that he had killed Reeva had been disbelief. ‘I’ve been around him quite a bit and I never saw any aggression in him,’ Herr said.

That would be another reason why he engaged energetically in the mission to overturn the Blade Runner’s ban, but the chief one was that he genuinely believed there was no legitimate case against him running a fair race against anyone. The Cheetahs were crude implements – ‘dumb, with no neural command’, Herr said – compared with the internally powered bionic devices Herr was using, never mind the exponentially improved ones that the future would hold in store. Herr enlisted the expertise of professors from Colorado University and Rice University to see if they could help him prove it to the satisfaction of the CAS.

More tests followed for Pistorius, along the same lines as the blade-testing routines in Reykjavik and the tests he had undergone in Cologne, but this time in a Rice University laboratory in Houston, Texas. Herr and his fellow scientists convinced themselves they had come up with more than enough data to refute the arguments of Dr Brüggeman and they delivered their findings to Marco Consonni, who in turn handed them on to Jeffrey Kessler, a well-known Manhattan lawyer enlisted by Consonni’s firm to present Pistorius’s case. In May 2008, Pistorius and his legal team traveled to the CAS in Lausanne to fight the ruling.

‘Professor Brüggemann’s main argument,’ Herr recalled, ‘was that the Cheetahs store and release more energy than human legs and
therefore use less energy, but we showed that contention to be deeply flawed. The point is that running fast has to do with force, not energy return. Force is about the guy who slaps ground harder over less time. What we were able to demonstrate to the court was that Oscar hits the ground with less force with his Cheetahs than a runner with biological legs. It’s like running on a mattress instead of running on cement. There is no advantage.’

Herr’s team had conducted a study on what he called ‘unilaterals’, single-amputee runners, and established that the biological leg actually applied greater force than the Cheetah, which meant it produced a more powerful return spring. These findings impacted critically on the key IAAF argument that running with the blades required 25 per cent less energy consumption. ‘We measured how much energy was used in race conditions by Oscar and a biologically normal person and found no significant difference,’ said Herr.

The reason he was fast, Herr continued, was the same reason all other top runners were fast: ‘He cranked the frequency knob way up. His speed came from the incredible frequency of the movement of his legs.’

Employing the arguments provided by Herr and his peers, Jeffrey Kessler insisted before the CAS that his client’s natural talent was hindered, not enhanced, by the Cheetahs. There were clear disadvantages to using them. One was the speed out of the starting blocks, significantly slower than it was for able-bodied runners, because they pushed with their calf muscles, whereas with a two-leg amputee the impetus could only come from the hips. Another was running around bends, where keeping one’s balance was also measurably more difficult on prostheses than on natural legs.

These two arguments were accepted as common cause by the tribunal’s arbitrators, who then invited the athlete himself to deliver a final address. Marco Consonni recalled the five-minute speech.

‘Oscar was brilliant. He said he wished to take part in the Olympics because he did not wish to be set apart because of his disability. He said he wished to belong to the world, not be hidden away in a corner. He said he never saw himself as a disabled person and never felt disabled and did not want to be relegated forever to the ranks of disabled competition. He said he wanted to compete with normal people, because there he had real competition and a chance to improve his capabilities. He spoke intelligently, maturely, quietly and naturally. Kessler wept. I think everybody in the chamber was impressed and moved. I saw that day that Oscar touches people.’

The CAS tribunal informed Pistorius of their judgment by means of a fax sent to Consonni’s offices in Milan on May 16, two weeks after the hearing.

‘Quite by accident, Oscar was there with me at the precise moment a secretary called to tell me the verdict was coming through, and so was Peet van Zyl,’ Consonni recalled. ‘The suspense was terrible as I read the pages coming through, eighteen in all, and we waited for the last page with the final ruling. Then I shouted, “We won!” And Oscar and Peet went crazy, also shouting, “We won! We won! We won!” And we all hugged and jumped and screamed and cried like little kids. The way was clear at last for Oscar to run in the Olympic Games.’

The unanimous ruling of the three CAS arbitrators was that the ban should be overturned with immediate effect, the IAAF having failed to come up with the burden of proof necessary to demonstrate that Pistorius derived ‘an overall net advantage’ from using the Cheetah blades. It criticized the IAAF for failing to take into account the disadvantage in his inability to burst from the starting blocks as fast as
his able-bodied competitors. It noted that the evidence assembled by Hugh Herr’s team showed that Pistorius used the same amount of oxygen as other runners and, far from expending less energy than his able-bodied rivals, ‘fatigued normally’.

Particularly satisfying to the jubilant threesome in Consonni’s office was a paragraph that read: ‘The Panel is reinforced in reaching this conclusion by the fact that the Flex-Foot Cheetah prosthesis has been in use for a decade, and yet no other runner using them – either a single amputee or a double amputee – has run times fast enough to compete effectively against able-bodied runners until Mr Pistorius has done so. In effect, these prior performances by other runners using the prosthesis act as a control for study of the benefits of the prosthesis and demonstrate that even if the prosthesis provided an advantage, and as noted none has been proven, it may be quite limited.’

That paragraph gave Pistorius special joy because it vindicated an argument he had repeatedly made when answering questions from the media, namely, ‘If the blades give so much of an advantage, then why aren’t other athletes who have them running as fast as me?’

Pistorius had got his way. He had taken on the highest authority in athletics, he had brushed aside the opinion of one of the greatest runners in history, and he had won his case. Never had he felt a more satisfying sense of vindication. He had proved his point. The phrase ‘I can’t’ did not exist in his lexicon. He himself might have been aware of the limits of his condition in his bed at night, with his prostheses off, but as far as the world at large was concerned he had no boundaries. That public persona was the one he cherished, the one he longed to believe represented his authentic self. The more ready the world was to recognize his all-conquering image, the more cemented became his idealized notion of who he was. In Lausanne in May 2008, when he obtained the endorsement of sport’s highest court, his public and
private personas merged into one. He had gained confidence in the belief that he was who he said he was, a man defined not by his unusual disability but by his extraordinary talent.

He kept on believing it, success after success burying any notion of disability ever deeper in his, and the public’s, mind – until shortly after three in the morning of February 14, 2013, when Reeva’s death and his own life’s great catastrophe laid bare the deceit. Everyone has weaknesses and fears, everyone tries to disguise or repress them. Pistorius’s weaknesses and fears were extreme and he had disguised and repressed them by extreme means. He had pulled off a brilliant trick both on himself and on public opinion, but now, on the global stage where he had played out his life’s drama, he was exposed for all to see. Frantic and fragile, stumbling gun in hand on his little stumps in the dead of night, in killing Reeva he had killed his own myth.

Now he faced trial for the second time. A court in Pretoria would have to judge whether the prosecution was right beyond reasonable doubt in its contention that he had known that the unseen individual at whom he had fired the four bullets was Reeva Steenkamp. Yet, for all the anguish and ignominy he endured, he retained just enough of his old self-belief to have faith that he could win this battle, too. He had got his way with the mighty IAAF. He could get his way again. After all, a year after that crowning moment at Lausanne, he had cheated death itself.

11

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
,
YOU NEVER CAN TELL

A
WEEK AFTER
Valentine´s Day 2009, South Africans woke up to the news that Oscar Pistorius was in a coma after a boat crash, apparently hovering between life and death. Four years later, some would stretch a point and recall the incident as one more piece of evidence pointing to crazed intent in the death of Reeva Steenkamp. But at the time, most responded with shock, distress and prayers for his recovery.

He and a male friend were on a speedboat on the Vaal River, fifty miles south of Johannesburg. Evening was falling and Pistorius was at the wheel. He never saw the jetty into which the prow slammed. The impact pushed his face hard into the wheel and launched the propeller high into the air. His friend, who was unharmed, stared at him aghast. Blood poured from one eye, tissue seeped from his mouth, a flap of skin had peeled off his nose. The hull had been breached and the boat was sinking fast. Pistorius jumped into the water and somehow swam to the river bank where he and his friend were dragged onto another boat. It was his good fortune that a cousin of his who was at medical school, one of Arnold Pistorius’s four daughters, had gone out with
him that day and happened to be on the other boat. He was in shock and she calmed him down as best she could, but he remained alert enough to be in fear of his life. The boat moored at the nearest landing, an ambulance arrived, paramedics attended to him and he was airlifted to hospital in Johannesburg. He prayed the whole way. On arrival, doctors discovered that his jaw was broken, the bones of one eye socket were in smithereens, and he had broken several ribs and lost three liters of blood. He was given morphine and other sedatives to induce a coma, and then submitted to reconstructive surgery on his face. Three days later he awoke naturally from the coma in the intensive care unit to discover that he had 180 stitches on his face and his jaw had been wired shut. The doctors said they expected him to make a full recovery, but noted how extraordinarily fortunate he had been. It was a miracle he had not suffered permanent brain damage.

Chastened, he underwent two months of physical therapy and resumed light training seven weeks after the accident, in early April, armed with a new determination to socialize less and become more serious about his running. In Paralympics he reigned supreme, having won gold in the 100, 200 and 400 meters in Beijing the year before, but he had failed to run fast enough to qualify for the able-bodied Olympics, a big disappointment after the elation of winning the legal contest in Lausanne. Bringing his times down to compete in the Olympics in London in 2012 became his number one objective.

Speaking to the press in May, by which time he had fully recovered, he said he had lost thirteen pounds in weight since the accident and had a lot of muscle tone and physical endurance to rebuild. ‘In my mind, there have never been any barriers for me in sport,’ he said. ‘I don’t perceive myself as having a disability. I see only my ability.’