One day during his first year at school, when he was still fourteen, he fell while running and broke his prosthetic legs. He went to his grandmother Gerti, who lived in Pretoria, for help. It was an emergency. He needed a new set of legs immediately. Instead of turning to his usual prosthetics specialist in Johannesburg, forty-five minutes’ drive away, she looked in the phone book, found a number in Pretoria and dialled it. The person who answered the call was Van der Watt. ‘It was a total chance occurrence. I just happened to pick up the phone,’ he recalled. ‘There were others working there. I was a junior, just starting out in my first job at a prosthetics consultancy. She described the problem and asked, “Can you help?” I told her to bring the boy in right away.’
A tall, big-shouldered, thick-wristed Afrikaner, Van der Watt had been destined from birth to be a farmer in his home country. Born in 1970, he was raised in the countryside near a town called Bethlehem in the Orange Free State, a landlocked province in the geographical heart of South Africa where apartheid was enforced with special rigor – it was the only region in the country where people of Indian extraction were not allowed to live – during the years when Van der Watt was growing up. Oblivious as most white children – indeed, most white adults – were to the way their darker-skinned compatriots were treated, Van der Watt’s memories of those days centered on life on the family farm, not least his father’s insistence that he get up at dawn to milk the cows. On finishing high school he was sent to study farming in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State. Less wedded to the land than family lore required him, however, he soon found himself taking an interest in the rather unusual subject studied by his college room-mate, orthodontics and prosthetics. To his parents’ dismay, he abandoned farming and left for Pretoria Technikon to acquire a qualification in that field. His success was such that he would end up moving to the United States, to the small town of Winnie, Texas,
where he lived with his American wife, two children and two horses, representing a company that manufactured artificial legs. But his first job – ‘sort of part-doctor, part-engineer’ was how he described it – was at the company in Pretoria that Gerti Pistorius phoned on that fateful day.
‘I had a look at his prostheses and saw at once they were beyond repair,’ Van der Watt recalled, sitting in the lounge of his spacious Texas home. ‘They were old-style, 1950s, wooden, and they were an ungainly mess.’
He decided he should find a set of new, improved prosthetics for the boy which would allow him to run and play. ‘He was shy,’ Van der Watt recalled, ‘but as I would soon discover he really pushed himself to the limit.’ They had several sessions together until they found exactly the right fit. Along the way, Van der Watt had a brainwave. ‘It was the year 2000, just before the summer Olympics and Paralympics. I was intrigued by this Paralympics thing and I got hold of a promotional video for the games, with music and stuff. I thought Oscar should take a look at it. He had no idea Paralympic sport existed and he sat there watching the video in my office, absolutely absorbed. He was smiling and I could sense a tingle in him. Watching that video sparked new dreams in the boy.’
What he needed now was a pair of carbon-fiber ‘Cheetah’ blades like the ones the Paralympic runners used. The originals were far too expensive and so Van der Watt, inspired by the boy’s zeal, decided to try and build a pair of his own. What he lacked was the knowledge required to work with carbon fiber and to mould the blades to the correct specifications. So he made contact with a man who worked with that very material in the manufacture of airplanes and drew for him on a piece of paper a model of what he wanted, based on the Paralympians’ Cheetahs, which had originally been inspired by the shape of the legs of the animal itself.
‘The airplane guy made the legs, I built the sockets into which Oscar would lock his stumps, I attached the two and we made a plan,’ said Van der Watt, who took a photograph of the fourteen-year-old on the very first day he tried them on. He looked proud as could be. The problem, they would soon find, was that they would have to make not just one pair, but several.
‘We went to the track thinking, let’s see what happens. Then he ran and broke the first pair in five minutes. I probably made five or six pairs until he stopped breaking them.’
His stumps bled, raw from the friction between the makeshift blades and the thin skin, as he pounded up and down the track. But he never gave up.
His persistence drove Van der Watt on. Man and boy were on a mission – almost a secret mission, for, while Pistorius’s mother knew and was immensely grateful to Van der Watt, the school had no knowledge of what they were scheming. Pretoria Boys had its own athletics track, but they conducted their experiments elsewhere. For Van der Watt the frustration of seeing pairs of blades that he had laboriously built break one after another was compensated for by the specialized knowledge he was developing about the mechanics of how they worked – sufficient knowledge for him to be recruited, a decade later, as technical adviser to the US Paralympic team.
The two critical elements in the development of an effective prosthetic blade were, first, the comfort of the socket into which the stumps fitted. ‘Think of a shoe,’ said Van der Watt, echoing Sheila Pistorius’s admonition to her son as he prepared for school in the
mornings. ‘Think a snug fit, not too loose, not too tight, but just right.’ Second, there was the alignment of the base of the blade, identifying exactly the correct angle for it to face, exactly where the maximum downward weight of the body would fall so as to exert optimum forward propulsion, maximizing use of the body’s energy. In addition to that, Van der Watt explained, it was important to get the weight and length of the blades just right, each in proportion to the runner’s strength and size.
But comfort was the key to everything, he said. ‘When you’re running you are hitting the ground with two and a half or three times your body weight. You measure that by the force applied on the ground, which bounces back as force on the limb, which then generates the forward running propulsion. If the fit of the prostheses is too loose or too tight, you lose speed and you gain pain.’
It was not until 2001 that they hit upon a pair that did not break and with which the boy was entirely comfortable. He was still playing rugby at school, using his normal everyday prostheses, but every other week he would go to a track to experiment with the home-made Cheetahs. At that stage, fourteen going on fifteen, his goal was not the Paralympics. Van der Watt could see he was fast, but he did not know how fast relative to potential competitors at the highest level of disabled sports. ‘To me he was just a kid, shy but a bit of a joker, who laughed a lot, played pranks, put staples into his legs to freak out people who did not know he wore prosthetics,’ Van der Watt said. ‘I was just doing my job for a nice Pretoria kid, with no plan or bigger goals. I was just helping the kid have a good life.’
He loved running on the blades but his chief obsession remained rugby, the sport you had to play at Pretoria Boys to impress your peers. But something had to give, and it did one day when he was playing against another school soon after he had turned sixteen. Two huge boys on the rival team tackled him at the same time. His artificial legs went flying, but he also hurt his knees badly. As he lay on the ground, a spectator goaded him, barking at him to get up and stop behaving like a girl. He did, and played the rest of the game, but after it was over the truth finally began to sink in that his future might not lie in rugby.
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