Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen (13 page)

BOOK: Oscar: An Accident Waiting to Happen

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Meanwhile back in London, Oscar’s histrionics must have been hell to witness. After a week of sharing a room with Oscar in the Paralympic village in London, teammate Arnu Fourie requested that he be allowed to change rooms as he was finding it hard to focus with all the drama that was unfolding in Oscar’s life. In an article in
Vanity Fair
published in June 2013, written by Mark Seal, it referred to a radio host interviewing Arnu. Asking him what it was like sharing a room with Oscar, Arnu replied, saying, “I moved out. Oscar is always shouting at people on the phone.”

I can vouch for that. I often used to say to Oscar: Where’s your roommate? Isn’t he sleeping? Aren’t you disturbing him? I know Arnu was a witness to many of these emotionally draining conversations, as sometimes Oscar would say, “Oh, he’s just arrived back,” and then he would carry on crying or ranting as if no one were there.

I often wondered why Arnu didn’t report Oscar’s mental meltdown to the coaches… and tell them that Oscar needed help. But who knows, maybe he did.

By now, it had become clear that Oscar’s emotional state was not only affecting his performance behind the scenes, but also on the track: Oscar seemed to have lost the focus he desperately needed to perform. Instead of winning the T44 200 metres, usually the favourite in that particular event, Oscar was outrun in the last leg of the race by 20-year-old Brazilian Alan Oliveira. We were all horrified as we watched him have a meltdown after the race, caught on camera going off about how Oliveira’s blades were longer than that of the rest of the field, giving him an unfair advantage.

For many people watching around the world, for the first time
they saw a side of Oscar that we of course were familiar with, but which most people had never experienced.

But instead of taking him to task for his unsporting behaviour the local and international media, as uncritical as ever of Oscar, ran with headlines like “Oscar in the right lane” and “Oscar to appeal”. It was clear that Oscar could do no wrong in their eyes. Because of his disabilities, it was very hard to ever say a bad thing about Oscar.

I had been guilty of the same overcompensation myself. I remember clearly an incident before the Olympics. One night, actually it was around 3am, while everyone in the house was asleep, I heard footsteps moving around and I immediately recognised Oscar’s movements. I was furious. He had arrived at a ridiculously inappropriate time of the early morning to see my child, instead of showing up on time the night before to take her out. From the sound of things, I could sense he had had too much to drink and was stumbling around. Prior to Oscar we had never been comfortable with boyfriends or girlfriends staying over. After the birthday party in 2011, he just assumed it was okay. It was my fault I guess for not voicing my disapproval from the outset or putting my foot down.

The next morning, I woke up and thought if he’s here I am going to bloody well tell him off… I thought, how dare he not show up, like a normal boyfriend would? How dare he upset her and make her wait for him like she had the night before and not call her, and then just pitch up drunk at a godforsaken time and expect it all to be fine and just stay over?

With all this in mind, I went to the bedroom, and opened the door, but as I looked in, I saw his prosthetic legs lying at the bottom of the bed. I stopped in my tracks. Immediately my anger turned to pity. Everything I had prepared in my head to say to him, all that anger, evaporated.

It was those legs – I felt compassion for Oscar and therefore excused so much of his bad behaviour. Those legs made me treat him differently even though I tried not to. It had nothing to do with him being this famous athlete and celebrity. His not having
legs was an extremely powerful component in how I thought about him. One was always sucked in by his disability, by the whole poor Oscar victim thing. The whole of South Africa, the whole world, seemed to have been blindsided into being politically correct around Oscar because of his disability.

But back at the Paralympics, where he was surrounded by people just like him and where he couldn’t play the victim card, Oscar wasn’t finding much joy. In the T44 100-metre final, another race in which he was tipped to win, he was soundly beaten by teenage British sprinter Jonnie Peacock, finishing in a disappointing fourth place. These were both normally Oscar’s sure-win events. I knew how devastated he was after both races.

But at least there was some gold glory for Oscar at the games: the South African relay team, with Arnu Fourie, Samkelo Radebe, Zivan Smith and Oscar, thankfully won the men’s T42-T46 4x100-metre relay and set a new world record of 41:78 seconds. And on the final day of the Games, Oscar won the T44 400 metres in a very impressive 46:68. But overall, that victory was bittersweet and did not make up for all the tears and trauma that had characterised the entire 2012 Olympic experience for Oscar.

It was an emotional moment, watching on television, how a stadium filled with 80 000 people broke into rapturous applause as Oscar, wrapped in a South African flag, did a victory lap. But as always, very few people were aware of the pain behind the mask.

This discrepancy between what the adoring public saw, and what was really going on behind the scenes, was acutely evident on the day that Oscar received his silver medal for the ill-fated Oliveira T44 200-metre event.

Oscar called Kerri-Lee from the Olympic underground train, on the way to the stadium to collect his medal. He was sobbing and sobbing uncontrollably on the phone. The phone call lasted a long time, and he was inconsolable the whole way there. Finally he arrived at the stadium, we could hear them calling his name out on television to receive his medal, but we also knew he was still crying on the phone to Ke. While she was pleading with him to go out there and collect his medal, I went downstairs and stood
beside her as she tried to encourage him. It was almost as if he was frozen by deep sadness, probably combined with a good dose of humiliation. The announcer on the TV in the background kept calling his name. It was totally surreal. Then Ke heard voices in the background asking him to come along, and someone else asking if he was okay. At this stage I was really praying that someone there could now see that the wheels had fallen off, and take him to get help.

This was one of the saddest moments we ever experienced with Oscar. But it was actually just symbolic for what had been happening in his life for a very long time.

While everyone had been clapping and cheering for Oscar over the years, the countless red flags indicating all sorts of psychological problems had been continuously ignored and brushed over. From the first emotional outbursts, reckless driving and gun episodes, what appeared to be the speedboat cover-up, the binge drinking, from as early as 2009, evidence had been mounting, indicating that things were not okay.

I kept wondering while I was on the phone to him during and before the Games, trying to encourage him out of his darkness, trying to dissuade him from sabotaging his career, while he wept on the phone with my children, where was his family, his management, his coach in all of this?

Even though he was estranged from his dad and couldn’t call “home”, where were the others?

I know he had flown his beloved gran and siblings over to London to be with him at the Olympics. I honestly thought that once his family had joined him, mentally things would improve and he would settle down and feel supported and loved. I kept encouraging him to reach out and speak to them, call a professional, ask for help, but he never did. I am still amazed that no one on that side picked up on the crisis, that no one saw fit to facilitate some kind of intervention. Maybe they did, but I was unaware of it.

Where was everybody when he was on the phone to us, weeping in the tunnel before the award ceremony to receive the silver medal for the 200-metre race? Why was no one supporting
him as he waited to go out in front of a packed Olympic stadium? While we were willing him on, speaking to him on the phone, literally telling him to take a step forward and go out there to receive his medal, why did no one from his camp see the puffy red eyes behind his sunglasses?

When Graeme Joffe repeatedly pointed out that Oscar’s behaviour was inappropriate and problematic, Joffe was immediately accused by his peers of having a personal vendetta against Oscar, and of being unfair. When the sports writer asked uncomfortable questions, no one seemed to be listening.

In numerous publications I read Joffe’s thoughts on how for years Oscar had been showing signs of being in crisis, “So much money was being made from Oscar that it appeared that the people who should have been taking care of Oscar on the mental front had forgotten about that side of the training. Who was preparing his mindset for all the challenges and demands that come with fame and success? I wondered a number of times whether there was any real grooming of Oscar while great things were expected of him.”

With money seeming to obliterate sense, people just kept on turning a blind eye to his issues and covering up for him. It’s amazing how strong an anaesthetic money can be, but it could only hide the pain of the dark truth for so long. The bottom line was by the end of what should have been a legacy of gold and glory, Oscar was a mess.