Dutoit

You hear a lot about dreams at the Olympics, and Natalie du Toit's should have died on a Monday morning in Cape Town when she eased her scooter out into the road and was broadsided by a careless driver. A week later she lay in a hospital bed with a stump where she used to have a left leg.

Six months after the amputation she jumped into the same swimming pool where she had made her name as one of South Africa's most promising teenage athletes and struggled to finish 25metres. “If I tried breaststroke on one leg,” she said, “I went round in circles.” As a tale of overcoming adversity, Du Toit may set a new Olympic standard tomorrow when, at the Shunyi lake, she unclips her prosthetic limb, hops to the edge of the water and embarks on the 10km marathon against the 23 best long- distance swimmers in the world.

She is not just here to take part but is aiming, realistically, for a top-ten finish, despite her obvious disadvantage. The wise 10km swimmer conserves energy in their legs and then kicks for the line. Du Toit does not have that luxury so must go out strong to put herself in contention.

They don't believe that a disabled person should compete in the able-bodied Olympics because the Paralympics are just as good,” she said. “But before my accident, I was an able-bodied athlete.” A talented one, too. At 14, she competed for South Africa at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Malaysia. At 16, she only narrowly missed qualifying for the Sydney Olympics.
“My brother was a swimmer and I used to sit on the side watching him. I despised water. And then one day, when I was 6, I was sitting there and I said to my mum, ‘I can swim.' I jumped in. I tried training and things went on from there.”

In the 200metres and 400metres butterfly, she was the best in her age group at 14 and 15. “I was on top of the world,” she said. But then, one February morning in 2001, came the accident that changed everything.

Du Toit had finished her morning training session and was heading off to school. Her parents had bought her a moped because the demands of her schedule meant that she needed to dash around Cape Town. Close to the pool was a busy crossroads where drivers would take a short cut through a car park, which is exactly what one woman did that fateful Monday rush-hour, hitting Du Toit and sending her and her scooter flying across the street.

A motorcycle policeman racing to the scene hit a truck and had to be airlifted to hospital. Meanwhile, Du Toit, conscious throughout, was being tended to by team-mates. She remembers her own agonised cry: “I've lost my leg, I've lost my leg.” Her foot was perfectly intact - “I was wearing a steel-cap shoe. There was only a dent in it” - but the rest of her lower limb was mangled. She is happy to recall all the details and does so with the poise of a woman who is a sought-after motivational speaker.

“If I can explain,” Du Toit said, “my leg burst open, like if you drop a tomato on the ground.” That was her calf and shin. Higher up, she had broken her thigh bone, her femur, in three places. “The bone burst through the skin, that is why you see a big scar on the top of my leg.” There is a hole the size of an egg.

In hospital, the doctors spent a week trying to save the leg. “They were going to take muscle out of my back and insert it in there and try and add some length, try to sort of piece everything together.

“They used this big exoskeleton to align the bones, but after four days it still hadn't knitted. And I had been through 24 units of blood because they had to keep scraping away the dead tissue. Nothing was bandaged, nothing could be sewn up.

A titanium rod could repair her thigh but, after five days, the doctors decided that they would have to amputate just above the knee. “I remember asking my mum, ‘When are they going to amputate?' My mum's answer was that they already had.”

It was only 174 days later that, restless, she jumped back into the swimming pool. “I didn't know if I would be able to swim,” she said. “I didn't know how fast I would be able to swim. I didn't know if I would be able to walk again. Breaststroke was difficult because I can't snap my legs together.”

But she still had the upper-body strength, and the lung power. And, subconsciously, her body started to make adjustments. She discovered only recently from watching video footage that her right foot had turned inwards as if to act as a rudder. And her left arm began to strengthen to compensate for the absence of her leg.

She started to compete in disabled races over short distances, then 800 metres in able-bodied competitions, including the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002. It was in the 10km at the World Open Water Championships in Seville in May, aged 24, that she came an astonishing fourth to secure qualification for the Games.

The open water is a race that does not only test endurance and ability, but toughness. At the turns around buoys, she would be pulled, kicked and elbowed. “They don't make any allowance for me,” Du Toit said.

Her story has been compared to that of Oscar Pistorius, the blade runner from South Africa, whose prosthetic limbs caused such controversy. But even if Du Toit wanted to use a prosthetic to race, the swimming federation would not allow it. And it goes without saying that there is no advantage to be gained from swimming with one leg.

In Beijing she has been sought after by the world's media, particularly after she carried the flag for the South Africa team at the opening ceremony. “What if I can't carry it, what if I trip and fall?” she wrote on her website beforehand. And afterwards? “The standing hurt a little, but it was all worth it. I had tears in my eyes when the flame was lit.”
The journey has had its difficult moments. Her mother upbraided her when she became downcast just before the Athens Olympics. She has had to learn to discipline her mind to fight off thoughts of “what if”.

By tomorrow, when she finishes the 10km swim, she will have ticked off two of her lifelong dreams by racing in the Games and visiting Kruger National Park. There is a third. “I want to run,” she said.