Pool hero backs clubfoot campaign
SOUTH Africa was almost robbed of Olympic gold and silver medals and world records 13 years ago. But Cameron van der Burgh stood to lose far more.
“I was mucking around on the diving boards and fell off and broke my ankle,” Van der Burgh said of an accident in Durban when he was 16.
“I went for an operation and the doctor said: ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to swim breaststroke again because of the way you need to rotate your ankle.’
“When something gets taken away from you, you’re determined to get it back because of how much you love it and want it.
“I got back in the water and I trained, and I was stronger because of the sheer determination. In my first season back I did my best times. I went from not even making finals to winning medals again.”
Now 29, Van der Burgh — who won the 2012 Olympic 100m breaststroke race, came second four years later and holds the records for the 100m and 50m short-course events — has thrown his support behind Steps, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to promoting a nonsurgical way of treating clubfoot, the musculoskeletal defect that causes feet to be twisted down and inward.
“When something can take away your ability to be the best you can be in future, and you have the ability to change that, that’s an amazing thing,” Van der Burgh said.
“All you need is the knowledge and the willpower to get through it.”
Most of the parents of the 2 000 children who will be born with clubfoot in South Africa this year probably will think surgery is the only option their babies have.
This can involve repeated trips to the operating theatre to have the relevant bones broken, and sometimes amputation.
But sufferers also have the option of a far less invasive procedure pioneered by Ignacio Ponseti, a Spanish-born orthopaedic surgeon who died in the US eight years ago at the age of 95.
His method has a success rate of 95%. Although Ponseti devised his treatment 50 years ago, it became popular only in the 1990s, when parents of afflicted children spread word about it over the internet.
Affected limbs are manipulated and put in plaster casts for the first four to eight weeks.
Patients undergo a minor proce- dure under local anaesthetic, then wear a brace on their feet full time for the next three months, and after that while sleeping. The correction stabilises between the ages of four and five.
Karen Moss became part of Ponseti’s success story after her son, Alex, was born with clubfoot in 2003.
In 2005 she founded Cape Townbased Steps, which now has 26 partner clinics in South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. The organisation works mostly with children from lowincome households who are patients at state clinics.
Steps trains medics, supplies braces, supports the clinics it partners, and campaigns to raise awareness of the Ponseti method.
“Being able to do anything you want, 100%, is pure freedom,” Van der Burgh said.
The more than 10 000 African children Steps had treated by the end of 2016 would no doubt agree.
When something gets taken away from you, you’re determined to get it back