interest in the rather unusual subject studied by his college room-mate, orthodontics and prosthetics. To his parents’ dismay, he abandoned farming and left for Pretoria Technikon to acquire a qualification in that field. His success was such that he would end up moving to the United States, to the small town of Winnie, Texas, where he lived with his American wife, two children and two horses, representing a company that manufactured artificial legs. But his first job – ‘sort of part-doctor, part-engineer’ was how he described it – was at the company in Pretoria that Gerti Pistorius phoned on that fateful day.
‘I had a look at his prostheses and saw at once they were beyond repair,’ Van der Watt recalled, sitting in the lounge of his spacious Texas home. ‘They were old-style, 1950s, wooden, and they were an ungainly mess.’
He decided he should find a set of new, improved prosthetics for the boy which would allow him to run and play. ‘He was shy,’ Van der Watt recalled, ‘but as I would soon discover he really pushed himself to the limit.’ They had several sessions together until they found exactly the right fit. Along the way, Van der Watt had a brainwave.
‘It was the year 2000, just before the summer Olympics and Paralympics. I was intrigued by this Paralympics thing and I got hold of a promotional video for the games, with music and stuff. I thought Oscar should take a look at it. He had no idea Paralympic sport existed and he sat there watching the video in my office, absolutely absorbed.He was smiling and I could sense a tingle in him. Watching that video sparked new dreams in the boy.’
What he needed now was a pair of carbon-fiber ‘Cheetah’ blades like the ones the Paralympic runners used. The originals were far too expensive and so Van der Watt, inspired by the boy’s zeal, decided to try and build a pair of his own. What he lacked was the knowledge required to work with carbon fiber and to mould the blades to the correct specifications. So he made contact with a man who worked with that very material in the manufacture of airplanes and drew for him on a piece of paper a model of what he wanted, based on the Paralympians’ Cheetahs, which had originally been inspired by the shape of the legs of the animal itself.
‘The airplane guy made the legs, I built the sockets into which Oscar would lock his stumps, I attached the two and we made a plan,’ said Van der Watt, who took a photograph of the fourteen-year-old on the very first day he tried them on. He looked proud as could be. The problem, they would soon find, was that they would have to make not just one pair, but several.
‘We went to the track thinking, let’s see what happens. Then he ran and broke the first pair in five minutes. I probably made five or six pairs until he stopped breaking them.’
His stumps bled, raw from the friction between the makeshift blades and the thin skin, as he pounded up and down the track. But he never gave up.
His persistence drove Van der Watt on. Man and boy were on a mission – almost a secret mission, for, while Pistorius’s mother knew and was immensely grateful to Van der Watt, the school had no knowledge of what they were scheming. Pretoria Boys had its own athletics track, but they conducted their experiments elsewhere. For Van der Watt the frustration of seeing pairs of blades that he hadlaboriously built break one after another was compensated for by the specialized knowledge he was developing about the mechanics of how they worked – sufficient knowledge for him to be recruited, a decade later, as technical adviser to the US Paralympic team.
The two critical elements in the development of an effective prosthetic blade were, first, the comfort of the socket into which the stumps fitted. ‘Think of a shoe,’ said Van der Watt, echoing Sheila Pistorius’s admonition to her son as he prepared for school in the mornings. ‘Think a snug fit, not too loose, not too tight, but
‘I had a look at his prostheses and saw at once they were beyond repair,’ Van der Watt recalled, sitting in the lounge of his spacious Texas home. ‘They were old-style, 1950s, wooden, and they were an ungainly mess.’
He decided he should find a set of new, improved prosthetics for the boy which would allow him to run and play. ‘He was shy,’ Van der Watt recalled, ‘but as I would soon discover he really pushed himself to the limit.’ They had several sessions together until they found exactly the right fit. Along the way, Van der Watt had a brainwave.
‘It was the year 2000, just before the summer Olympics and Paralympics. I was intrigued by this Paralympics thing and I got hold of a promotional video for the games, with music and stuff. I thought Oscar should take a look at it. He had no idea Paralympic sport existed and he sat there watching the video in my office, absolutely absorbed.He was smiling and I could sense a tingle in him. Watching that video sparked new dreams in the boy.’
What he needed now was a pair of carbon-fiber ‘Cheetah’ blades like the ones the Paralympic runners used. The originals were far too expensive and so Van der Watt, inspired by the boy’s zeal, decided to try and build a pair of his own. What he lacked was the knowledge required to work with carbon fiber and to mould the blades to the correct specifications. So he made contact with a man who worked with that very material in the manufacture of airplanes and drew for him on a piece of paper a model of what he wanted, based on the Paralympians’ Cheetahs, which had originally been inspired by the shape of the legs of the animal itself.
‘The airplane guy made the legs, I built the sockets into which Oscar would lock his stumps, I attached the two and we made a plan,’ said Van der Watt, who took a photograph of the fourteen-year-old on the very first day he tried them on. He looked proud as could be. The problem, they would soon find, was that they would have to make not just one pair, but several.
‘We went to the track thinking, let’s see what happens. Then he ran and broke the first pair in five minutes. I probably made five or six pairs until he stopped breaking them.’
His stumps bled, raw from the friction between the makeshift blades and the thin skin, as he pounded up and down the track. But he never gave up.
His persistence drove Van der Watt on. Man and boy were on a mission – almost a secret mission, for, while Pistorius’s mother knew and was immensely grateful to Van der Watt, the school had no knowledge of what they were scheming. Pretoria Boys had its own athletics track, but they conducted their experiments elsewhere. For Van der Watt the frustration of seeing pairs of blades that he hadlaboriously built break one after another was compensated for by the specialized knowledge he was developing about the mechanics of how they worked – sufficient knowledge for him to be recruited, a decade later, as technical adviser to the US Paralympic team.
The two critical elements in the development of an effective prosthetic blade were, first, the comfort of the socket into which the stumps fitted. ‘Think of a shoe,’ said Van der Watt, echoing Sheila Pistorius’s admonition to her son as he prepared for school in the mornings. ‘Think a snug fit, not too loose, not too tight, but
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