Oscar Pistorius' autobiography out this week; he says his prosthetics have taken him everywhere he's wanted to go in life

From The Times in South Africa:

SA’s champion Blade Runner reflects on his life in a new book (pictured).

It was a pair of flesh-coloured prosthetics fitted when he was just 17 months old that made South African athlete Oscar Pistorius “invincible” around his family’s Johannesburg home.

But it was a rugby injury at high school years later that would put the double amputee on track to greatness.

In his autobiography, Blade Runner, due to be released this week, the Paralympic sprint champion reveals how a rugby “hospital pass” left him with a severe injury, compelling him to spend time recuperating away from contact sports, on the athletics track.

In June 2003, two players tackled him as be was about to catch a ball on the rugby field . His left leg lay at a strange angle afterwards but, assuming that this was because of damage to his prosthesis, Pistorius finished the match and cycled the 6km home.

The next day, he woke with a bruised knee — his amputations begin below the knee — and could hardly move.

“It looked like my sporting days were over. I was only 16 ,” the 22-year-old writes.

Pistorius had dabbled in wrestling, cricket and rugby, but avoided athletics which he “loathed” .

“When I started athletics for my rugby rehabilitation, I thought, Geez, this is terrible,” Pistorius told the Sunday Times in an interview this week. “Lo and behold, months later I was running at the South African Championships for disabled athletes, and eight months later I was in Athens.”

He took gold in the 200m in Athens, ahead of Marlon Shirley and then world champion Brian Frasure.

Born in a Sandton hospital in 1986, Pistorius was a healthy baby except for his legs — neither had the fibula bone, and his feet were malformed.

His parents, Henk and Sheila, gathered information about his condition and learned to answer questions without embarrassment — a habit Pistorius has picked up; if children stare at him in public, he simply explains to them why he “has no legs”.

Pistorius describes his parents as “stubborn people” who decided, after meeting with 11 amputation specialists, to amputate both his legs before he started walking.

Of his first pair of prosthetics, he writes: “I loved them; from that day on I became invincible, a wild child.

“My energy was boundless, and I saw no reason why my new legs would not be able to take me everywhere I needed or wanted to go.”

And go he would, with the support of his family, including elder brother Carl and younger sister Aimée. Carl — who Pistorius describes as his “guardian angel” — “drove me crazy, lecturing me on how to take good care of my stumps”.

But prosthetics also landed him in an Amsterdam jail in 2006.

The day before travelling, he had been to a shooting range with a friend and ended up with gun residue on his legs — which made airport security suspicious when they scanned him after his prosthetics set off an alarm.

After earlier confusion about lost air tickets , the officials were ready to suspect he was a terrorist — and kept him locked up for several hours.

“You always hear that sometimes good kids land up in jail or in a holding cell, but it’s really scary when you’re overseas and you don’t have a phone,” he said in the interview. “ I was stressing when I was in there. It wasn’t lekker. ”

For running, Pistorius famously switches to the hi-tech carbon-fibre prosthetics that earned him the nickname Blade Runner.

In 2008, he started a lengthy legal battle with the International Association of Athletics Federations to be allowed to compete against able-bodied athletes. This was after a series of tests run on behalf of the IAAF were said to show that his carbon-fibre legs would give him an unfair advantage .

He won the matter on appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport . But he failed to qualify for the 2008 Beijing Olympics by .70 seconds.

Nevertheless, he went on to take gold in the 100m, 200m and 400m events at last year’s Paralympics.

Pistorius writes of his childhood that t he family lived in an “enormous house” and were “spoilt rotten” — until they had to scale down after his parents divorced when Pistorius was seven years old.

All three children lived with their mother .

Sheila — whose birth date, and the date of her death are tattooed in Roman numerals on Pistorius’s right arm — was not there to witness her son’s athletic success. She died in March 2002, after initially being misdiagnosed as having hepatitis .

Pistorius was at school when his father fetched him and took him to his mother’s bedside . She no longer recognised anyone, he writes.

“ She had slipped into a coma and she was heavily intubated as her organs were failing,” he writes. “It broke my heart to see her this way. She no longer looked like herself.”

Pistorius, who is involved in a charity for landmine victims in Mozambique, writes: “I am sure that she would have heartily approved of my attempts to help those less fortunate than myself in this moment of triumph and fame in my life . It has certainly been a privilege for me.”

He says that he would have to “think carefully” if “God were to ask if I wanted my legs back”.

“Had I been born with normal legs, I would not be the man I am today,” he writes.