Three lives of Oscar Pistorius

Abstract

Oscar Pistorius, an amputee runner from the Republic of South Africa moving on prosthetic legs became a person whose presence on sports arenas put under question the foundations of our knowledge about social life. The text focuses on the analysis of the runner’s social phenomenon. It is carried out through the perspective of his “three lives” and the event that concludes them. The first life of Pisorius is a life of a disabled person. It poses questions about the limits of possibilities of the human body and its improvements. The second life of the South African athlete concerns his connections with technology. The fact that he is using ultra-modern prosthetics has turned him into a “cyborg” and “blade runner”. The third life regards a social transgression that the athlete embodies. The event that ends the sports life of Pistorius concerns multi-dimentional postcolonial violence