Natalie du Toit: Keith Duggantalks to a woman of unsinkable resolve.
THE FIRST time Natalie du Toit swam an open-water race, she was in danger of going under. Perhaps not in explicit danger of drowning: after all, she had been a South African international swimmer since the age of 14 and had come through the trauma of losing a limb in a motorcycle accident when on the cusp of adulthood just three years later. Nobody ever questioned her toughness.
But here she was turning on the first buoy in the cloudy Guadalquivir River in Seville in the event she hoped would give her a place in Beijing. And she discovered, to her cost, that out in the ocean, it was a dog-eat-dog world.
She was shocked. Pool swimming involves a refined kind of savagery, drawing untold hours out of elite swimmers so that they might shave fractions of a second off their best times.
You do race the swimmers lining up on the blocks with you but ultimately in the swimming pool you are chasing your own best time and that infernal, never lying clock.
Pool swimming means waving to the galleries, receiving floral bouquets and keeping disappointments and triumphs masked behind a smile and congratulations for fellow swimmers. Open water was different.
"I panicked," du Toit remembered with a laugh, over the phone from Cape Town. She was in the last few weeks of training before the South African swim team departed for training camp in China.
"I just wasn't used to going around the buoy and having people trying to dunt you under the water. They do hit you. They do kick and scratch you. I just wasn't used to that. So I actually sat back and waited for everyone to swim on and then I caught up with them again."
By the end, her politeness had given way to her instinctive competitiveness. She finished the race with a bruised eye and a scarcely believable fourth place, the spot that guaranteed her qualification for Beijing.
The abrupt arrival of what had been a childhood dream left her somewhat stunned. She had to wait for her coaching staff to bring her prosthetic leg before she could leave the water and begin celebrating.
Du Toit had been the toast of Paralympic swimming for the previous four years. Now she had eclipsed her compatriot Oscar Pistorius in becoming the first amputee athlete to earn a place in the Olympic pantheon of able-bodied athletes.
Unlike Pistorius, who faces constant scrutiny from fellow sprinters about the alleged advantage of his spring-fitted carbon-fibre artificial limbs, nobody can question that du Toit is at a distinct disadvantage in the water.
Although she has the broad-shouldered, triangular gait of a natural swimmer and can generate significant kicking power through her right leg, her shoulders and arms are the chief propellers, and over the cut and thrust of a two-hour swim, it stands to physiological reason that her fatigue should be more acute.
Remarkably, she trailed the winning time by just five minutes in Seville and the gold-medal woman, Russia's Larisa Ilchenko, has not been beaten in either the 5km or 10km disciplines since 2004. That very first race clarified for du Toit that none of the other swimmers were going to make allowances for her apparent disability.
The sight of Du Toit lining up on pontoon has made for some arresting photographs but once the field of swimmers hits the water, her disability is, of course, out of sight and she is just one of the barely distinguishable human threshing machine of arms and legs moving remorselessly across the surface.
"We tend to swim in a clump together. That is the biggest difference from being in the pool. Also, you have to look for your own direction. It is usually four laps of 2.5 kilometres and the buoys are usually a kilometre apart so you have to look where you are going because it is quite easy to drift off a straight line.
"Also, the finish doesn't involve touching a wall - the touch pads are placed higher up so you can actually see who tips first. You can eat within the race as well because obviously you can dehydrate in the water over a period of a couple of hours, particularly in a place like Beijing, with the humidity and high temperatures.
"So open water is basically like the swimming marathon and I think that is why it made sense for them to have it in the Olympics."
In an ideal world, du Toit's sporting life would have followed a slightly different trajectory. She was leaving her local pool in Cape Town after an early-morning training session when a car pulled out onto the road and struck her as she passed on her scooter. The gravity of her injury was immediately obvious: du Toit never lost consciousness and, after looking down at her leg, concluded she would not be able to keep it.
That was in February of 2001. By May she was back in the pool, and the following year she took gold medals in the 50m and 100m multi-disability races in the Commonwealth Games.
Paralympic stories are, almost by necessity, about the human capacity for fortitude and determination and courage that borders on the superhuman. But even so, something about du Toit's reaction to what was a devastating personal misfortune seems to have touched a chord with many people.
It would, of course, be terrible for any 17-year-old to have to cope with such a debilitating accident but du Toit's life had been framed around her love of swimming, her ferocious competitive edge and the fact she happened to excel at the sport. It would have been easier to buckle at the sheer unfairness of it all but it was not an option du Toit gave herself.
She speaks, in her musical Cape Town voice, about the dark hours of those early months of rehabilitation without ever attempting to gloss over that what she went through was harrowing and, in some respects, life-changing.
"From when I was six years old, my dream was of getting to the Olympics, you know. You don't sort of dream you're going to have a motorcycle accident and go to the Paralympics. So in that manner, able-bodied swimming has always, always been important to me. But when I had my accident and I looked down and saw what my leg looked like, I think I realised then I had lost it.
"My parents went through the hassle of worrying whether I was going to be able to keep my leg or have it amputated, that type of thing. When I started swimming again, I had no power. I had no endurance. But I could still swim! And I got stronger. So my dreams got more realistic after I started qualifying for teams and improving my times. So I decided I would just train as hard as I could and, you know, if I get there, I get there.
"That is one of my messages: you don't have to be the champion. I mean, I am not number one. But my dream was to get to the Olympics and I gave up studying and that type of thing to get to where I am today. But it has paid off for me.
"And maybe I would never have reached the Olympics but at least I would know that I did everything in my heart to get there. Obviously, there are days when I am down. I have bad days. But everyone around me keeps me going. They stay positive for me. They just say, 'Come on, it happened, you have to move on from there'.
"And training - swimming - is a way of switching off, of forgetting about everything. So in those ways, I have coped."
In truth, she excelled. The five gold and one silver she won in the 2004 Paralympic Games elevated her profile in her home country to the extent she was voted in the top half of the 100 Great South Africans awards held in 2004, above such luminaries as Zola Budd and Francois Pienaar.
In a country where the fissures of a tumultuous history are easily seen, here was a universal example of someone who has triumphed in the face of the most sudden and appalling obstacle.
Du Toit simply carried on undaunted, and that, combined with her youth, made her a person many admired. Not that she felt there was any other way. Conversation turns to The Horse Whisperer, the big, blockbuster film that swept the world a couple of years before she had her accident and gave the Hollywood treatment to a girl who had been in an equally violent car crash with similar consequences.
"Yeah, I saw The Horse Whisperer," du Toit says dubiously. "When I watched that movie, it was quite a sad movie. It was one of those films that you watch once and don't want to watch again. My accident happened when I was 17 years old. I was in my last year at school. And how can I say it? You always see people in a worse off position than you and you say, well, I am not that bad. So if they can do it, I can do it. That is how I have gone on.
"You take inspiration from a lot of places. And definitely, there are people out there who have made just as much of their lives as I have. I was just one of those stories that was put in the media. Nobody knew who I was before the accident. Nobody knew I was South African champion or that I wanted to go to the Olympics before that happened. And there are other people who have tried everything in their power to get to the Olympics and that was the best that they could do."
And that has been the other cosmic change Natalie du Toit has had to deal with since that February morning. In suffering so terribly and recovering with such resilience and grace, she has, both through her athletic feats and the power of her story, become famous.
The truth is that most Olympians pass through the Games practically unnoticed. Qualifying for this great athletic carnival is, by and large, a private victory unless you happen to rank among the very elite in your discipline. Since qualifying in May, du Toit has already achieved a degree of immortality. She did not set out to eclipse Oscar Pistorius's cause and dearly hoped the sprinter would make it to Beijing.
In fact, du Toit is almost neutral about the fuss caused by her special status, as someone capable of competing with the best in disabled and ablebodied elite sports. She understands that it is of general human interest. But for her, making it to Beijing has really nothing to do with her having lost the lower half of her leg and everything to do with the fact that being an Olympian was an ideal she had set herself from a very young age.
Predicting medals is not her style but she will allow that a top-five finish is a realistic ambition. And after that, who knows?
Every Olympics throws up names and stories that define and images that define those Games as celebrations of the better possibilities of human nature. The hunch here is that Natalie du Toit will make just such an impact when she hits the tepid waters outside Beijing.
A home bird, she admits the thought of spending two months in China is a bit nerve-racking. And on top of that, she is probably going to have to deal with the clamouring of news people and television crews from around the globe eager to broadcast her journey from swimming prodigy to this point.
"I don't know if I will get extra media attention," she says evenly. "I probably will do. But I am just going to take it one day at a time. I mean, I have never been to Beijing before and with the food and such a different society, I don't know what to expect.
"I am not going to say, 'oh I am going to win bronze.' That is not the kind of person I am. I know I will go out there and swim my heart out but everyone else will be doing the same thing. So we will see."
And, as she told herself during the loneliest afternoons, when swimming from one end of a pool in Cape Town was a slow and painful drag, if she gets there, she gets there.