True guts and glory
SA’s haul of 17 medals at the Rio Paralympics belies the incredibly tough battles that most disabled athletes have to overcome
As the Boks crash and Bafana Bafana burn, the rise of disabled sport continues to be one of the success stories of post-demo cratic SA. The creation of a Paralympic culture undoubtedly has something to do with the achievements of Oscar “Blade Runner” Pistorius and swimming star Natalie du Toit, but in the past 20 years we’ve become a nation that is tuned in to disabled sport.
Some generous sponsorship has raised awareness and once every four years many South Africans find themselves quietly admiring disabled athletes’ courage and star quality.
Despite taking place in a warren of categories and subcategories, the recently completed Rio Paralympics introduced a number of new stars and served to underline the claims of those already reasonably well known. Having won three medals in Beijing in 2008, Hilton Langenhoven, for example, won gold in the men’s long jump in Rio.
Langenhoven is an albino with impaired sight — indeed, he can see no further than about 3m. His disability is not insignificant: it conspired to rule him out of the men’s 400 m semifinal heats in Rio, where he was disqualified for stepping outside his demarcated lane.
But come the long jump, he recorded a leap of just over 7m — not bad for an athlete some had been hinting was possibly past his best. (He is 33.)
“This gold means so much to me,” he says. “There have been good times and there have been hard times, but I still always believed I could win gold.”
Langenhoven went on to take silver in the T12 200 m, his seventh Paralympic medal.
As if to mirror the many wonderful stories of SA athletes in the able-bodied Games in Rio (for example, 400 m world recordbreaker Wayde van Niekerk being coached by a grandmother, Ans Botha), members of SA’s Paralympic contingent were in no mood to be outdone. Take Charl du Toit. He won double gold, in the T37 100 m and 400 m, a remarkable achievement given his cautious expectations going into the Games.
Du Toit’s uncle, Johan, was shot in a robbery in June and died shortly before his nephew’s departure for Rio. While not referring to his uncle’s death specifically, Du Toit alluded to the tough times he and his family endured recently.
And after winning gold, he said: “We all took nicknames from songs that we liked — that was part of our motivation for the Games. Mine was ‘Smiling Lightning’.”
Smiling Lightning made the best of his talent, his resolve and his family’s troubled times in first breaking the world T37 100m record in his heats in Rio, before going on to take his double gold. He dedicated his world record to his uncle.
Ilse Hayes, like Du Toit, is based at Stellenbosch. She grabbed silver in both the T13 100 m and 400 m, underlining the fact that, in the able-bodied and disabled Games alike, Afrikaans universities have played vital roles in providing good training regimes and coaching facilities.
Were it not for this institutional endeavour, one wonders quite how far SA’s medal haul in the two Games of Rio would have plunged. Imagine what it would be like if some of the traditionally Englishspeaking universities — the University of Cape Town and Wits, for instance — started to pri-