"I'd like to show people that if you put the hard work in and you believe in yourself, then you can do whatever you want to," he said. "I still find it strange, I suppose, when I say to someone, 'Can you just pass me my leg?' But I don't ever think about my disability. Putting on my legs like putting on my shoes."
The casual innocence of those mantras has been irrevocably lost. The pedestal he occupied as the great Paralympic crusader merely magnifies the extent of his downfall, the finality with which his body of work, one that cemented him among *Time* magazine's 100 most influential figures, has unravelled as a consequence of a fatal lapse of reason.
Nothing, of course, should distort the fact that the ultimate tragedy is that of Steenkamp, who only a few hours before her death had been preparing animatedly for her future, talking with her publicist about a speech she was due to deliver the next day to girls at Sandown High School in Johannesburg. In her address she planned she talk of how she grew up cash-strapped on a farm and lost her self-respect with an emotionally abusive boyfriend, only to gain it anew through her modelling work, where she liked to style herself on Cameron Diaz. Pistorius's punishment for killing her that night is but a frippery when set against the burden that her bereft parents, June and Barry, must carry.
But ever since the concept of 'hamartia' recurred through Aristotle's Poetics, in an attempt to describe man's ingrained iniquity, our impulse has been to identify a telling defect in those brought suddenly and dramatically low. With Pistorius, that task is fraught. Yes, there were instances of grandstanding and obsessive behaviour, but many were concealed at the time to help protect an aggressively peddled narrative of Pistorius the paragon, the emblem, the trailblazer.
In retrospect, the disquiet suggested by his 2011 interview on BBC Today, when he flounced out at the question of whether he was an "inconvenient embarrassment" to athletics over his efforts to run with able-bodied competitors, clearly went deeper. Nothing, however, could be allowed to skew the perfect lineaments of his story. For a start, he had over £1.5 million a year in endorsements to protect. Any intimation of complexity would spoil the gloss.
Scratch deeper, and certain dissenting voices clamoured to be heard. From the moment of that destructive violence at Pistorius' home, in a gated Pretoria community, a fresh resonance was attributed to the remarks of his ex-girlfriend Samantha Taylor, who claimed: "Oscar is certainly not what people think he is." Her mother Trish wrote on Facebook: "I am so glad that Sammy is safe, and out of the clutches of that man. There were a few occasions when things could have gone wrong with her and his gun during the time they dated."
The longest hiatus in this seven-month trial took place when Judge Thokozile Masipa ordered that Pistorius be subject to a full psychological evaluation. Doctors reported that they found no mental health problems that could have compromised his actions against Steenkamp, although another piece of testimony, from forensic psychiatrist Merryl Vorster, argued that Pistorius would react with extreme force to any perceived threat of an intruder because of an "anxiety disorder" arising from his disability.
His instinct to respond through fight rather than flight, as emphasised by the judge, was instilled early by his mother Sheila, who died when he was only 15 from a brain haemorrhage. It was she who had initiated the decision to amputate both his legs below the knee at the age of 11 months, later imparting the philosophy that "the loser is never the person who crosses the finishing line last – the real loser is the person who sits on the side, who does not even try to compete."
Those words form the opening to Blade Runner, his 2012 autobiography, a book that upon revisiting feels painfully premature. Maternal wisdom has echoed through his life at every level, to the point where he acknowledged that her passing left him and his brother Carl as "rudderless boats". He even had the dates of her birth and death stencilled on to his arm. While Sheila had taught him thoroughly about the virtue of self-sufficiency, in light of all his arduous physical challenges, there were few clear mentors left to furnish him with moral guidance.
Father Henke, as an absentee parent who spent most of Oscar's childhood working on a dolomite mine in the Eastern Cape, was in Pistorius' description "more of a mate". About the only lasting lesson he gleaned from his dad was about the necessity of self-protection, given South Africa's stratospheric crime rate throughout his formative years, which became used as a justification for Henke and his brothers owning 55 guns between them.
Once Pistorius grew in renown for his accomplishments on the track, winning four gold medals at the Beijing Paralympics, he took to ratcheting up his personal security by keeping a handgun by his window and a baseball bat on his bedside table. By this stage, there were whispers that the bubble of celebrity he inhabited was beginning to colour to conduct. David O'Sullivan, a writer and radio host who has known the Pistorius family for decades, recalls how Pistorius once asked to go on air to complain about the inadequacy of the kit he had been given, while one of his room-mates in Beijing reputedly moved out, disclosing: "Oscar is always shouting at people."
The preoccupation with guns was well-documented. When Michael Sokolove of the New York Times visited Pistorius at his house in the winter of 2012, the sprinter took him to a nearby shooting range to practise with a nine-millimetre handgun, the same form of weapon as the Parabellum pistol with which he killed Steenkamp. "Maybe you should do this more," Pistorius told him. "If you practised, I think you could be pretty deadly." He was then pressed on how often he came to this place. "Just sometimes when I can't sleep" was his reply.
Even in the thick of his Olympic preparations in Gemona, Pistorius would indulge himself in forays to an Italian rifle range, tweeting on one visit that he felt "amped to the max". The symmetry with the footage of Pistorius shooting a watermelon with the words, saying afterwards, "It's not as soft as brains, but f--- it's a zombie-stopper," is unsettling.
In other manifestations of his capacity for violence, Pistorius allegedly threatened in November 2012 to "break the legs" of Mark Batchelor, the South African football player whom he believed had slept with his then girlfriend. Batchelor accused the athlete of intimidation, but no charge was ever brought. In a separate incident at the Kyalami racetrack, Pistorius confronted Quinton van der Burgh, a Cape Town coal-mining magnate, after hearing that he had been intimate with one of his former girlfriends. Van der Burgh claimed Pistorius had been so aggressive that he enlisted a lawyer to obtain a restraining order.
Allied to this facet of his character was an occasionally unhinged alpha-male exuberance, as seen in his accident on the Vaal River in 2009, when he needed 172 stitches to put his face back together after crashing his boat into a submerged pier. But the impetuousness of an adrenalin junkie did not, of itself, constitute the make-up of one disposed to kill.
Assuredly, it was never the face of Pistorius sold to the world. He was romanticised relentlessly as a symbol of South Africans' ability to withstand adversity, of the country's reinvention post-apartheid, and as an antidote to its corrupting culture of violence. In that context the dismantling, in the days after Steenkamp's killing, of giant billboards that bore his face was a painful reflection of the shattering of that image. The traumatic realisation of what Pistorius had done invited parallels with the fate of Hansie Cronje, the supposed gentleman cricketer, also wrenched from the loftiest perch when he was banned for life for match-fixing only eight months before he was killed in a plane crash.
In the 19 months since the desperate events at Pretoria's Silver Lakes estate, the acceptance that the Pistorius narrative needs to be recast has been far from straightforward. One local columnist contended that the idea of him as a killer was tantamount to discovering Archbishop Desmond Tutu with his hand in the till. "Oscar was our good thing," Sarah Britten wrote. "Now his story, and our part of it, lies in tatters."
Pistorius, with his gently lilting Afrikaans inflection and his calculatedly urbane persona, was keenly aware of the cult of personality that had built around him. "Sport," he declared, "is something that the whole nation can unite around. People can forget their problems." Would that this were so. Sport, in the final analysis, afforded no protection against Pistorius' fateful moment of haste. Masipa might have cleared him of murder and the most savage punishments at her disposal, but for Pistorius the knowledge that he killed the woman he purported to love is, by his own acknowledgment, a life sentence enough.
The Pistorius tale has frequently been upheld as a parable, perfectly describing the arc whereby one man satisfied a fractured nation's desperation for heroes and then let everybody down. He has been spared the prolonged prison term, but Masipa's is a verdict without absolution. Pistorius' fall was complete the second he shot a beautiful, blameless 29-year-old woman dead.
A plethora of voices are emerging to offer mitigation, from his uncle Mike, who maintained he "could never see Oscar doing what happened in the room that evening", to friends who insist that he "loved Reeva deeply". And yet Pistorius, both as sportsman and public figure, has been sentimentalised quite enough. Amid any mawkishness at his ruin we risk, crucially, losing sight of the fate of Steenkamp. For she is the one who no longer has any voice at all.
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