Pistorius, Oscar

Oscar Pistorius, in full Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius, byname Blade Runner, (born November 22, 1986, Johannesburg, South Africa), South African track-and-field sprinter and bilateral below-the-knee amputee who, at the 2012 London Games, became the first amputee to compete in an Olympic track event. He also was the first Paralympian to win a medal in open competition, when he earned a silver medal for his contribution to South Africa’s 4 × 400 relay team at the 2011 International Association of Athletics (IAAF) world championships. His athletic accomplishments were overshadowed when he was convicted of murder in 2015.

Pistorius was born without a fibula bone in either of his lower legs. His legs were amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old, and six months after that he learned to walk on fibreglass pegs. His parents, the owners of a zinc-mining business, encouraged him to participate in sports. He played water polo and rugby in secondary school until he injured a knee in 2003 playing rugby. Pistorius began track training to rehabilitate that knee. Shortly after obtaining his first carbon-fibre prostheses—the source of his nickname “Blade Runner”—Pistorius won the 200-metre event at the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens and claimed a bronze medal in the 100 metres.

At an elite invitational competition in Rome in July 2007, Pistorius first competed internationally against able-bodied athletes, improving his best time in the 400 metres to 46.90 seconds. His impressive performances caught the attention of the international track-and-field governing body, which asked him to participate in a series of tests. The results indicated that Pistorius’s high-tech prosthetic legs imparted an unfair advantage, enabling him to expend less energy than able-bodied athletes running at the same speed. In 2008 the IAAF Council banned him from able-bodied competition. Later that year, however, a Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) appeals panel revoked the ban, though the issue continued to cause much debate. Later that summer Pistorius won three gold medals at the Beijing Paralympics—the T43/T44 class 100 metres, 200 metres, and 400 metres—and set a world record in his class.

Head injuries that Pistorius sustained in a boating accident in 2009 set him back throughout 2010, but he rebounded in 2011 to win gold in the 100 metres and 400 metres at the Paralympic World Cup before qualifying for the world championships. Although he was not a member of the relay team that raced in the final, his participation in the qualifying heats of the 4 × 400-metre relay earned Pistorius a world championship silver medal. He was the 22nd fastest 400-metre runner in the world in 2011. Although his times did not qualify him for the South African Olympic team in 2012, Pistorius was selected to race in the individual 400 metres and the 4 × 400-metre relay. When he ran in the former event at the London Games, he became the first amputee to compete in track at the Olympics. Although he reached the semifinals, Pistorius failed to advance to the medal round. In the 4 × 400 relay, his team made the finals but did not medal.

On February 14, 2013, Pistorius fatally shot his girlfriend inside his home, a walled complex near Pretoria. He claimed that he had mistaken her for a burglar who was hidden inside a locked bathroom and that the shooting was accidental. Pistorius was subsequently charged with murder and released on bail. His trial began in March 2014, and in September he was found not guilty of murder, but he was convicted of the lesser charge of culpable homicide. The following month Pistorius was sentenced to five years in prison. In October 2015, however, he was released, with the remainder of his sentence to be served under house arrest. On December 3 of that year, a five-judge appeals court found that the lower court did not properly apply the rule of dolus eventualis—a South African legal concept that hinges upon whether the accused foresaw the possibility of death as a potential outcome of his actions—and found Pistorius guilty of murder, overturning his previous conviction. In July 2016 he was sentenced to six years in prison, and in November 2017 South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal increased the sentence to 13 years and five months.