du Toit fulfilled her dream

BEIJING – None of it seems strange to Deirdre du Toit. Her amputeed daughter wanted to keep swimming, so she kept swimming. She wanted to continue competing at a high level, so she trained harder than she had before. She wanted to make an Olympic team, she made an Olympic team.

“The thing is, when you’re normal for 17 years and suddenly you lose a limb, you’re not disabled mentally,” the mother of South African Olympic marathon swimmer Natalie du Toit was saying Wednesday. “You’re still the same person. So you want to do the same things you’ve done before.”

Now 24, Natalie du Toit finished 16th in the first women’s Olympic open-water 10K race Wednesday, undone by a flimsy cap and a muggy morning that overloaded the upper-body muscles already taxed to compensate for a missing left leg. She removes her prosthetic before swimming.

She had dreamed of a medal here, aspired realistically for a top 10 finish. Instead, she was reminded of the lesson of that day in 2001 when a careless driver crushed her left leg as she rode her scooter from the swimming facility where she trained in Cape Town, crushing her Olympic dreams – or so it seemed – as well.

The lesson? “It’s to use the negatives in a good light,” Natalie said. “It’s to come from an accident and say, ‘I can still do it if I work hard.’ I think that’s the most important thing. To believe in yourself. To set goals and to never give up.”

Du Toit’s goals were modest at first.

“She just wanted to get back in the pool,” said her mother.

Natalie still felt like the teenager who barely had missed making her Olympic team, felt powerful even as she still outswam her peers.

But her peers were not Olympians with big kicks and bigger finishes. Normalcy had its limits there. Distance swimming, where kicking was a corollary to success rather than crucial to it, seemed a better fit.

“I had a couple of people who have said to me that it would never be possible,” she said. “But a dream is about what you set for yourself and not what other people set for you.”

At the Athens Paralympics in 2004, du Toit won five golds and a silver. She became an international phenomenom, though, when she finished fifth in an Olympics qualifying race in Seville last May, just 5.1 seconds behind winner Larisa Ilchenko, of Russia.

That got her here, the first amputee ever to qualify for the Summer Olympics.

“I have enormous respect for her,” said Ilchenko, who won the gold medal Wednesday. “I would go so far as to say she should be awarded a separate medal.”