I met Oscar Pistorius – he fooled everybody with his charm

One evening in August 2012, outside the Olympic Stadium in London, I saw something that seemed to sum up the glory of that summer’s Paralympic Games.

It was at the end of an evening of athletics, in which the South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius had won his race, hurtling round the track on his carbon fibre blades. As the crowd filed out, there was a boy of about 12 playing in the stadium’s shadow. He was wearing shorts which exposed the fact he too had blades instead of lower limbs.

He was running around in a glorious abandon, playing tag with his mates, and evading their every attempt to catch him, making everyone who passed him smile. Speaking to his father, I was told that until that summer, the lad had been embarrassed by his lack of legs, wearing long trousers to cover up his disability. Now, his dad said, thanks to Pistorius, he wanted to show the world his prowess on his newly purchased blades.

This is what the Paralympics seemed to offer: a magnificent insistence that being born so apparently disadvantaged was no restriction to ambition.

And it wasn’t just that lad who was taken by it. What a sight Pistorius was, running not just in the Paras but the Olympics too, challenging the able bodied on his space-age prosthetics, flying round the course at breathtaking pace. In London that summer, he was the poster boy of both games, his face on a giant billboard alongside the M4 on the way into the city from Heathrow.

This was an athlete for the ages – not just a winner, but a role model of international significance. A contender who made it clear with every victory that nobody need be held back by disability.

And then, less than a year later, the morning after Valentine’s Day 2013, the world woke up to the news that he had been arrested and charged with killing Reeva Steenkamp, his poor girlfriend, as she cowered in the bathroom of the apartment they shared.

When the case came to court a year later, Pistorius’s rationale for shooting her five times through the bathroom door – that he thought it was an intruder hiding in there – was found to be utterly risible.

Such was the fascination with Pistorius’s fall from grace that one South African broadcaster set up a television channel dedicated to the ins and outs of the case. As court proceedings dragged on, propelled by Pistorius’s ability to pay for hefty legal advice, speculation for his motives was feverish. Stories emerged that he had long been quick to fury and more than reckless with guns, once firing live bullets through the sunroof of a friend’s car as they toured round Johannesburg.

Journalists from all over the world flocked to the high court in Pretoria, forcing the judiciary to limit the media presence in the courtroom. Over the course of a lengthy trial, that he was guilty seemed obvious.

What was less clear was whether conviction was inevitable. And when it came, there were eyebrows raised at the length of his sentence: the initial five years, served under house arrest, seemed ludicrously lenient. Indeed, the High Court of South Africa in 2016 overruled the judgement, sentencing him to 16 years, minus the time already served. His victim’s mother, June Steenkamp, put it succinctly when he was released on parole this week, after serving nine years behind bars.

“There can never be justice if your loved one is never coming back, and no amount of time served will bring Reeva back. We, who remain behind, are the ones serving a life sentence.”

Now Pistorius is free – albeit under significant restriction. Quite what he will do now is hard to predict.

The question for many of us who followed his upward trajectory, however, remains: were we duped in our rush to promote him as the greatest thing on two blades? Did we misread the signs as we cast him as some sort of saviour? Was his murderous potential hiding in plain sight?

I was certainly complicit in the urge to talk him up. The year before the 2012 Olympics, for which he controversially had earned qualification (there were many who reckoned the spring in his blades gave unfair advantage), I spent three days with him in Tanzania, where he was working for the international sports charity Laureus. The organisation had invited me to watch him deliver a training session for a bunch of youngsters in the shadows of Kilimanjaro.

I wrote about how charismatic he was, about how the children responded so positively to his joking and joshing. When he discovered I was a fellow Manchester United fan, as we were driving back to the airport conducting an interview in the back of his chauffeur driven transport, he insisted on stopping outside a cafe called Old Trafford he had spotted, where we had a picture taken of the two of us with our arms round each other’s shoulders. My piece, I recall, gave no hint of any dark side. Rather it was a eulogy about a great runner who seemed to be a great bloke.

“This is an athlete remarkable not for his disability, but his ability,” I wrote. “If a man like him, born without fibulas, whose lower limbs were amputated soon after he was born, can achieve Olympic qualification, what on earth are the rest of us doing?”

It was that image created around him of spotless integrity and decency that made his crash all the more extraordinary. From glorious role model to cold-blooded murderer, it seems almost incomprehensible. Until you learn that part of what had driven him to the top all along was a ferocious temper, a sudden fury at not getting his own way. We were all duped.

Not least that lad who found him such an inspiration as he belted around outside the Olympic Stadium that summer night in 2012.