Living the Olympic dream

Not abnormal. Just different. Words to live by in the Pistorius home

“Please forgive me. But sometimes I get very emotional when I talk about my son. My heart fills with so much joy when I realise that this young man is going to be able to help so many people. The world will be a better place to live in by virtue of his existence.”

That was, you will probably remember, Earl Woods, getting a little carried away at an awards dinner to honour the outstanding American college golfer of 1996.

It’s not for us to judge how prophetic the words have turned out. But might they help us imagine how Henke Pistorius is feeling this week? It is 25 years since Henke held his second child in his arms that first time and knew, despite everything around him continuing as normal, that something didn’t feel quite the way he expected it to.

In the postscript to his son’s autobiography, Henke remembers. “There was something different about your feet. I never said there was something wrong, or abnormal. We opened the blanket that you were swaddled in and one of your feet was very narrow, too narrow.”

Both were. Both had just two toes. Further inspection revealed each leg was missing its fibula.

Soon, Henke stood in front of a surgeon who recommended cutting both legs at the thigh. Outraged, he walked away, refusing to pay the bill. Though a miner not a doctor, he knew, instinctively, it made no sense to sacrifice two working knee joints.

A second opinion and a third and more. Henke had contacts, some money and determination. Eventually the family trusted somebody and accepted amputation below both knees was the wisest course, ideally before Oscar attempted to walk. And so the operation was performed when he was 11 months old.

Not wrong. Not abnormal. Just different. Words to live by in the Pistorius home.

On his way, with Oscar, into a support group meeting, Henke spotted a little girl with no arms heading the same way. Her mother quickly crossed the street, telling the child there were too many people around sure to stare.

Henke didn’t attend that meeting or any others, making up his mind that many parents were, unwittingly, hindering their children with preconceptions and barriers. He was determined that Oscar should never shy from the stares. He would acknowledge barriers only as hurdles.

This week, Oscar was selected to run for South Africa in the Olympic Games, the latest chapter in perhaps the most inspiring story in the history of sport.

Sadly, it will never be a story without questions, controversy and whispers that he can run so fast only because of the Cheetah blades that carry him round the 400m dash. Science once concluded an advantage was certain and he was banned, but an appeal to the Court of Arbitration in 2008 succeeded. The science had not factored in his disadvantages. Pistorius cannot, after all, generate power from his calves or achilles. Everything comes from the hips and those salvaged knees. His start, by peers’ standards, is poor. Able-bodied athletes turned Paralympians by tragedy have never been able to match their earlier times, even with blades.

Ironically, after all he has overcome, it is probably Oscar’s limitations keeping the sceptics at bay. He acknowledges a place in the final is the very extent of his London ambitions. While he doesn’t threaten a podium, there is no great appetite to make an official issue of his participation.

In the meantime, he can inspire so many seemingly without hope. And his uniqueness has made him a wealthier man than an athlete running his times could ordinarily dream.

But just as Tiger Woods shied from the pedestal his father constructed, you sense Pistorius is sometimes tempted to cross the street to avoid the stares.

“All I want is not to spend my career discussing my legs,” he said, last year. “I don’t want to be treated differently to any other athlete.”

Somewhere, along the way, Oscar and Henke drifted apart, after his parents divorced when he was six. Before his operation, his mother Sheila wrote her baby a note to read when he was older. She died when Oscar was 15, but not before filling him strength and self-belief.

Part of the note read; “The real loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last. The real loser is the person who sits on the side, the person who does not even try to compete.” Whatever happens in London, Oscar has won and won well.