Oscar Pistorius became a global icon in 45.44 seconds during the 2012 London Olympics, in front of 80,000 roaring spectators and a constellation of camera flashes. The South African’s 400-metre sprint was the first time in Olympic history that a double-amputee competed. It capped Pistorius’s Olympic triumph over hardship. His journey from disadvantaged youngster to world-class athlete seemed to exemplify the finest of athletic achievement and the human spirit. Then, in the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2013, he shot and killed his 29-year-old model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at his posh Pretoria home.
Prosecutors claimed Pistorius failed to demonstrate real regret
He later admitted that he mistook her for an intruder. During his 2014 trial, he sat for months in a windowless courtroom. On appeal, a five-year manslaughter conviction was raised to murder, and he was sentenced to six years in prison in July 2016, less than half the minimum time for the charge. The athlete sobbed, shook, and vomited in the dock as the circumstances of his lover’s terrible death were scrutinized in painful detail in front of a global audience. After the state filed an appeal, the Supreme Court of Appeal more than doubled the sentence to 13 years and five months in 2017. Prosecutors claimed Pistorius failed to demonstrate real regret. “He’s not only broke, but he’s broken, there’s nothing left,” his lawyer, Barry Roux, said during his sentence hearing in 2016.
Now, a decade later, he is up for parole for the second time. He was refused early release in March due to what the constitutional court later determined was an error in determining whether he had completed the minimum prison period required to be released. The high-profile murder trial revealed the now 37-year-old’s darker side, revealing a dangerously volatile man who enjoyed firearms, attractive women, and fast automobiles. In 2009, he spent a night in jail after reportedly attacking a 19-year-old woman at a party in an out-of-court settlement. He was charged with discharging a gun through the sunroof of an ex-girlfriend’s moving car two years later.
He accidentally discharged a gun in a Johannesburg restaurant weeks before shooting Steenkamp. Fearing intruders, the sprinter slept with a pistol beneath his bed at his home in a high-security estate. June Steenkamp, Steenkamp’s mother, stated in March that she does not believe Pistorius has given the truth about what happened. Born without fibulas (calf bones) in Johannesburg in 1986, his parents decided to amputate his legs below the knee when he was 11 months old so he could be fitted with prosthetic legs.
“You put on your shoes, and Oscar, you put on your legs, then meet me at the car,” Pistorius said in a 2011 interview
This enabled him to participate in sports, and he excelled at them, focusing on running only after injuring his knee while playing rugby. “It was never made an issue. My mother would say to my brother, “You put on your shoes, and Oscar, you put on your legs, then meet me at the car,” Pistorius said in a 2011 interview.
He was the middle child whose parents separated when he was six, and he had a strained connection with his father Henke, but he was close to his siblings, who supported him in court. His mother died when he was 15 years old, and the date is tattooed on his arm. He broke the 200m world record at the Athens Paralympics in 2004, just eight months after starting out on the track. Following that, he won the 100m, 200m, and 400m sprint medals at the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games, launching a struggle to compete in able-bodied athletics, overcoming claims that his custom-built carbon-fibre running blades gave him an unfair edge.
He was the first amputee to compete in the World Championships in 2011. He made history a year later when he became the first double-amputee to compete in both the Olympics and the Paralympics. “He is the definition of global inspiration,” TIME magazine said of him on its list of the world’s most influential people in 2012. Pistorius was featured on the cover of the magazine “Man, Superman, Gunman” less than a year later.
