After Comrades on crutches, Luvuno aims for Iron Man
From a drug-addict bully he has become hooked on running
● Xolani Luvuno felt the pain of the Comrades Marathon in his shoulders and forearms last Sunday, but that was nothing compared with what he experienced on his road out of hell.
As far as the Comrades Marathon Association was concerned, there was nothing official about the amputee’s 90.184km odyssey from Pietermaritzburg to the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban. He began the trek long before the official start, and the trek took him longer than the maximum 12 hours given to entrants.
No medal, no certificate. No problem. Luvuno had achieved a long-term goal and now he’s dreaming of doing a half Iron Man triathlon in January, a full Iron Man later in the year and then the 2019 Comrades.
Pretty good for an ex-con and drug addict who became a homeless beggar after his right leg was amputated because of cancer.
Luvuno, originally from Pedi in the Eastern Cape, grew up in Port Elizabeth’s Motherwell township where he dropped out of school after Standard Eight and turned to a life of crime, breaking into schools and stealing equipment.
He was also a gangster, robbing people at knifepoint.
But he was arrested, convicted and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment at St Albans in the Friendly City.
After being released he struggled with his leg, which had swollen substantially, and he had it checked out.
Cancer was diagnosed and doctors amputated the limb above the knee in 2009.
Not only was crime no longer a viable career, he couldn’t stay in the city where he was notorious.
“I used to be a bully,” says Luvuno. “Now I’m bullied.”
So he headed to Durban, where he could be anonymous, but discovered there were other problems for a Xhosa beggar on the Zulu streets. “It was like another apartheid.”
Then he relocated to Pretoria, begging at intersections and sleeping under a bridge at night.
He could make R300 a day, all of which would go to drugs. “You didn’t have to buy food,” he says, explaining that they’d get fed by workers at a nearby fast-food outlet or receive food parcels from women drivers.
Luvuno was hooked on nyaope.
At first he smoked it, but when the hit wasn’t enough, he injected.
He was already vulnerable as a disabled homeless man, once waking up to find his neck being pressed down under the boot of a man while an accomplice robbed him.
To have a safe high, Luvuno would pay another beggar R50 to watch over him.
He was an addict in March 2016 when Hein Venter decided to stop and chat to the one-legged beggar he had driven past near his work in Centurion.
“I asked if he was a drug addict and he lied, he told me no,” recalls Venter. “But I’m glad he lied because if he’d said yes I would have left.”
Luvuno remembers that Venter gave him R1 000 that day, and he spent every cent on drugs.
Venter offered Luvuno a job at the perfume sales company where he worked. “Two days later Xolani came and said he was an addict.”
The waiting lists at rehab centres were long so Luvuno went cold turkey, suffering as the poison left his body, vomiting and shivering.
“At nights when I went back to the room that was rented for me, I asked them to lock me in,” Luvuno said.
A week later he was clean of drugs, but then started struggling with alcohol as a binge drinker, another problem he had to overcome. He even lost his job, but returned two weeks later asking if he could work again — without pay. They took him back.
Meanwhile, the company offered financial incentives to employees to run, from a few hundred rand for completing a 10km race up to R15 000 for doing the 2018 Comrades. Luvuno did receive a medal on the Comrades finish line, but that was arranged by Venter.
But he’s not taking a cent of his R15 000 prize. He pulls out a photograph from his bag of children in wheelchairs under the sign, Ethembeni School for Disabled Children.
“I want them to get the money,” he says.