Authors: John Carlin
He did become more able, spending longer hours training, cutting out milk and red meat from his diet, limiting himself to a steady
regime of fish, chicken and vegetables. Before the accident he had been drinking and eating like a normal person, now his body became leaner and more sculpted, his face – twelve months after the accident all signs of his injuries had disappeared – less chubby. Sobered by how close he had come to death, maturely aware that big potential sponsors were keeping a close eye on him and that there was a large monetary incentive to being able to perform at his peak, he made the shift, as his agent Peet van Zyl would note later, from amateur to professional.
Part of his new seriousness of purpose was displayed in his decision to train during the European summer, when most of his serious athletics competitions were held, at a European base. The place he chose in Italy served not only to tone his body but to calm his mind. He came to call it his home away from home.
He first visited Gemona del Friuli, a small town in the foothills of the Alps seventy miles north of Venice, in 2010. The mayor made him an offer he chose not to refuse. In exchange for becoming Gemona’s ‘ambassador’, which meant publicly associating his name with the town’s, he would be paid a nominal sum of 10,000 euros per year and have unrestricted use of the town’s new running track and sports facilities, plus free accommodation. It suited him well. Flying back and forth from South Africa to athletics meetings in England, Germany, Holland and elsewhere on the European continent was not only tiring and time-consuming, it was bad for his health. With long-haul flights he ran the risk of developing blood clots in his legs due to the airlines’ insistence that, for safety reasons, he keep his tight-fitting prostheses on from take-off to landing. The dryness of the air inside the plane also increased the chances of the skin at the end of
his stumps becoming irritated. Gemona, an hour’s drive from Venice airport, offered him relatively short trips to his European destinations, minimizing the possibility of him arriving for races tired or in pain.
He made Gemona his base camp from May to September in 2011 and 2012. It was a neat, quiet, picture postcard Italian town of 12,000 people. A sheer mountain dramatically overhung a 700-year-old cathedral, and a castle stood on a spot where ramparts were first built in the seventh century. Gemona’s more recent, and unhappy, claim to fame was an earthquake in 1976 that had killed 400 people, left thousands homeless and devastated the town’s ancient buildings. It took a decade for the cathedral to be restored; the castle was still being rebuilt when Pistorius installed himself thirty-five years later.
The people of Gemona saw in him a mirror of themselves. They were survivors. Not given to self-pity, they had overcome the consequences of natural disaster by dogged persistence. The town’s motto could have been written for the man he tried to be when he stayed there:
‘Senza lacrime a denti stretti’
– ‘without tears, with gritted teeth’. Gemona was a place where sloth was despised and hard work was the highest virtue. The inhabitants’ attitude to life had more in common with that of their Austrian neighbours, across the mountains to the east, than with the
dolce vita
associated with their southern compatriots.
The three-star family hotel where Pistorius stayed was the Hotel Wily, the name deriving from the nickname the original owner, Guillermo Goi, had acquired when he lived in Germany half a century earlier. His granddaughter, Luisella, ran it now, with her aging father and assorted relatives in perpetually busy attendance.
Luisella asked Pistorius when he arrived whether he wanted the one room of the fifty-four in the hotel that been adapted for people
with disabilities, but he replied, much in the spirit of his mother when they had first met the headmaster of Pretoria Boys High, that there was no need to make any special allowances for him. He could get by as well as any man. She gave him room 201, the most spacious one she had – but, in keeping with the hotel’s unassuming style, a world away from the plush suites he stayed in when he attended race meetings in London or Berlin. It was a spartan room with none of the period character one might have expected in a town ornamented with Renaissance architecture. The wood panelling was fake; the floor, linoleum. There was a double bed with a thin mattress and two rickety single beds, unremarkable framed pictures on the walls, the largest a stock portrait of the Virgin Mary, and a small television set. The window looked onto the hotel car park. But the bathroom was something else altogether. Strikingly at odds with the unpretentious functionality of the hotel, Pistorius had at his disposal an ample shower cubicle with two spouts facing each other across the two side walls and a third one at waist height. All manner of levers and buttons offered a confusing variety of watery possibilities, from gentle drizzle to stabbing squirts to thunderous cascades.
During his stay at the Hotel Wily he did not share the shower with anybody else. The person appointed by the municipality to interpret for him and attend to his everyday needs, a slim and attractive young English-speaking local called Anna Pittini, said that he remained celibate during his stays in Gemona, determined to spend his time there in professionally monkish solitude. (Peet van Zyl would describe his life in Gemona later as that of ‘a running monk’.) Pittini was the one person in the town in whom he confided, chatting to her about his family, the loneliness of his world travels and the difficulty of being so far away from his girlfriend, Samantha Taylor – whom he missed, but who also stirred a jealousy in him that
he tried to control, but could not. Rumours spread in Italian gossip magazines that he and Pittini were having an affair, but she said they were nonsense. More innocent of the wider world, but capable of seeing deeper into him than he into her, she became like a sister to him in Gemona, the trust that developed between them reaching such a point that once he allowed her into his hotel room when he had his artificial legs off. She was taken aback at how short he was, how odd-looking on his thin stumps, but she was grateful to him for having given her what she felt was the intimate gift of revealing his vulnerability.
Anna Pittini was, as she described it, his ‘shadow’ during the months he spent in Gemona, and his daily routines almost became hers.
‘He would wake up at about 7.30,’ she recalled. ‘He would go down for breakfast to the hotel restaurant and have lots of eggs, but only egg whites. He would have a shake too, with nuts and berries. He had a shaker in his room where he made his own blends. After breakfast he would go back to his room to rest or contact friends back in South Africa on his computer and then he would head off to the track.’
Pittini offered to take him in her small car but he always insisted on walking. It took him fifteen minutes, always with a pack on his back in which he carried his protruding running blades. He made no attempt to hide his condition, as he did with most of his social set in South Africa. There was a childlike quality to the people of the town, and a kindness that suggested no one was trying to judge him or to take his measure in the way they did elsewhere.
Once at the sports complex he would sit on a bench and quietly change his walking prostheses for his blades. Some of the time his coach, Ampie Louw, would be there with him, but if he was not, Pistorius asked Pittini, whom he enjoyed calling his ‘babysitter’, to record his running times.
‘Most days a small group of kids came along to watch and he was always nice to them,’ Pittini said. ‘He would smile and say “
Ciao, come stai
?” (“Hello, how are you?”) and sign autographs and take pictures with them. But he was always far more focused than other athletes, including some from South Africa who also came to train here. He would say, “The track is my office. I am here to work.” He did not allow pictures or videos to be taken and I remember once he got very angry with a woman who was standing by the track smoking a cigarette. It was surprising to see him explode like that, but then I thought it would have been strange if he did not from time to time. Always to be so sweet and polite would not have been natural.’
The training, so intense he often bled as Pittini recalled, lasted an hour and a half and then he returned to the hotel for lunch. The menu at the Hotel Wily was vast, as was the hotel’s dining space, which could seat 580 people, but he always stuck to the same modest fare: salad with chicken breast. For dinner it would be more chicken breast, accompanied by vegetable soup. ‘He did eat pasta and chocolate cake, but very, very rarely. Usually when he was a in a bad mood,’ Pittini said.
In the afternoons he would train for an hour in the gym then go back to his room and Skype with friends, or play video games or watch movies using a video projector he had brought along with his luggage. ‘He was a lone wolf,’ Pittini said. ‘Other foreign athletes would come out with me at night to a party or a bar but he almost always stayed in his room.’
The disciplined lone wolf was the man Pittini got to know, but she became aware that there was an entirely different side to his personality. From photographs he showed her and conversations they had she was able to paint a picture of the fast life he led back home in South Africa after the running season was over.
*
In Gemona he walked everywhere, in South Africa he drove flashy cars; in Gemona the people he mixed with were devoid of all pretensions, in South Africa his social set strove to ape the glamor of Hollywood or Cannes – men with gold chains and Mr Universe muscles, women in bandage dresses, stiletto heels and year-round orange tans. It was a world where everybody was on stage, perpetually on display, not so much conversing as performing, where the most valued social currency was to be seen in the company of the best-looking or most ostentatiously wealthy men and women, where leering males hunted for casual sex, where the chatter, the squealing and giggles were all about who was dating who, where intense whispered debates were held about who was wearing the tackiest dress in the room.
Afraid of crime as he was, Pistorius had the comfort of knowing that here the bad guys were on his side. Some of the men whose company he kept on his visits to Johannesburg nightclubs with names like The VIP Room or Taboo were either known or suspected gangsters. One of his pals, Kenny Kunene, had been jailed for six years for fraud. Another, a Johannesburg multimillionaire called Craig Lipschitz, who always had four bodyguards around him, ran a tow-truck business – the South African press always referred to him as ‘the tow-truck baron’ – and had been involved in a savage brawl in 2008 in which, according to media reports, a nightclub bouncer was repeatedly stabbed. But there were more poseurs and parvenus than hardened criminals in the social scene Pistorius frequented, spoilt rich kids or small-time TV personalities who would enjoy the frisson of nudging each other and saying, ‘Look, there’s the guy they say ordered that gangland killing last week,’ or, ‘Is it true that so-and-so just bought his girlfriend a yellow Lamborghini?’
Pistorius also knew, to his secret delight, that there was no one they chattered about more than him, invariably in fawning terms. He
was good-looking, he was a snappy dresser and, even if he was not as rich as some of the crooks or colorful characters he knew, he was rich enough. Above all, he had something money could not buy. He was a genuine superstar, in South Africa and abroad, in whose glow the beautiful girls and powerful men all wished to bathe. They did not register, as Pittini had, that at night when he went to bed he took off his legs and stood barely five foot on his knobbly stumps. They saw him as he wished to be seen. He was – like them, only more so – in an adolescent world where everybody strove to cover up their fragility by earning the approval of their peers through crassly obvious material display, where promiscuity was rampant, and being regarded as cool was the highest accolade.
Pittini described the women in the pictures that he showed her as ‘Barbies’; many of the men, for all their efforts at sophistication, looked to her like cheap hustlers.
Pistorius succumbed to the allure of such individuals in Italy, too, when he was away from Gemona. Typical of the hangers-on who sought his company back in Johannesburg was an Italian called Federico Russo, from the Adriatic city of Trieste. Russo’s mischievous self-confidence had procured him access to the masters of the nightclub scene in the fashion city of Milan, where his credibility was enhanced by describing himself as the celebrated Blade Runner’s Italian agent. In the wide-eyed South African, eager to be welcomed into the hip Milanese elite, he saw an opportunity to make money. Steered along by Russo, Pistorius took part in a music video and received invitations to appear in low-brow, high-ratings Italian TV programs. In return for big sums of money, Pistorius appeared in a ‘dance-with-the-stars’ show where, before a live audience, on a vast stage bathed in blue, he performed a tango with a bleached blonde in a low-cut, black sequined dress. Another time he flew to a Pacific island to take part in a reality
TV show called
L’Isola dei Famosi
, the island of the famous, where celebrities competed with each other to see which one of them could get by best in the tropical wild.
Anna Pittini found his participation in such shows silly, she said, and also disappointing because she felt they presented an image of her friend that did not do justice to what she regarded as the intrinsic nobility of his character. The frivolous side of him corresponded to the glimpses she had caught of his arrested emotional development, the teenage stews she saw him get into over Samatha Taylor five thousand miles away in South Africa. Pistorius phoned Samantha continually from Gemona, either jealously checking on her movements or complaining about how lonely he felt without her. The bad moods Pittini spoke of when he took solace in pasta and chocolate cake were the result not of a poor day’s work on the running track, but of his long-distance squabbles with Samantha, whom he would describe earnestly to Pittini as ‘the one’ – which she was, until he met Reeva Steenkamp.