The Life of Oscar Pistorius

The  Life of Oscar Pistorius
Oscar Pistorius trains inside a converted garage at the home of his personal trainer, a former professional rugby player. Iron pull-up bars and a variety of ropes and pulleys are bolted to brick walls. Free weights are lined up on the floor, along with hammered-together wooden boxes that serve as platforms for step-ups and standing jumps. Some of the equipment is clamped to an exterior wall of the garage, opposite an uncovered patio; when it rains, athletes just carry on and get soaked. “It’s old-school,” Pistorius said as we drove up to the place early one morning. “Some of the guys who train here, they bang it so hard, they often get sick in the garden. Nobody judges them.”

I visited with Pistorius last month in Pretoria, South Africa, where he was born 25 years ago without a fibula in either of his legs. (The fibula runs between the knee and ankle, beside the tibia.) His parents yielded to doctors’ recommendations that his lower legs should be amputated, and at 11 months, they were cut off just below the knee. At 13 months, he was fitted with prostheses. At 17 months, he was walking. Now he is among the top-ranked 400-meter runners in the world and a favorite to qualify for the 2012 London Olympics this summer. If he achieves this goal, he will be the first person without intact biological legs to compete in an Olympic running event. If he runs for South Africa in the 4-by-400-meter relay — and if Usain Bolt, the world-record holder in the 100- and 200-meter dashes does the same for Jamaica, as he hopes to — the finals of that event could be the marquee moment of the Summer Games.

In media accounts, Pistorius is often referred to as the Blade Runner because of the J-shaped carbon-fiber prostheses that he wears in competition. He has also been called the “fastest man on no legs.” The nicknames accentuate his otherness, as if it is important to set him apart from the rest of the field. An article published by the Berman Institute of Bioethics, at Johns Hopkins University, speculated that Pistorius may be a “pioneer on the posthuman frontier,” whatever that might mean. For what it’s worth, a South African magazine recently anointed Pistorius the country’s sexiest celebrity.

The artificial legs Pistorius runs on, called Flex-Foot Cheetahs and manufactured by an Icelandic company, have been a point of contention, and he has had to fight efforts to exclude him. But amputees have been running on the Cheetahs since the late 1990s. None have approached his best time, 45.07 seconds, in the 400 meters.

When I watched Pistorius train at the garage that morning, he had on traditional plastic prostheses that emulate the shape and look of biological legs and feet, which are what he wears for daily living and all activities other than running. For 90 minutes, he progressed through a series of pull-ups, push-ups and situps while grasping rings attached to the ropes. He looked like a gymnast. The exercises were meant to build strength in his core — particularly important for a runner who has no muscles or nerves in his lower legs and therefore must get all his thrust from above the knees. He executed a set of jumps on to a two-foot-high box, which I said I was impressed by, to my immediate regret. “That’s not very high for me,” he said. “I can do a lot higher.”

Near the end of his workout, Pistorius put on boxing gloves and unleashed a barrage of punches at his trainer, Jannie Brooks, who held a pair of padded mitts at shoulder level. He looked adept at this, which made sense, since boxing is one of the many sports he has competed in — along with wrestling, water polo, rugby and motocross. Brooks told me he has worked with Pistorius since he was in high school. “He came around with his mates, looking for training,” Brooks recalled. “He was just one of the bunch of them. It was six months before I realized he didn’t have lower legs.”

Any notion that Pistorius has somehow “crossed over” into able-bodied sport is inaccurate. When he ran in the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens, at age 17, it was one of the few times he had ever competed against other amputees. In fact, he had only recently even heard of the Paralympics.Learn more>>>