Standing a few feet away in a crammed courtroom, Oscar Pistorius appeared much smaller than I remembered. Thinner, certainly, but also shorter somehow, shrunken almost. His voice, on the two occasions when he was asked to speak by a magistrate, was barely a whisper.
As last year's Paralympic champion was formally indicted and sent to trial, charged with premeditated murder for the Valentine's Day killing of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, I managed to catch Pistorius's eye just once, wondering if he would recognise me and remember.
It was foolish to expect he might. How irrelevant now is the time we spent at his training camp in northern Italy last year, talking before his historic appearance at the London Olympics? Or the photos he gleefully showed me on his cellphone of some of his favourite experiences since we last met? And how distant is the hug he surprised me with, as he came off track after running in an Olympic final?
In court in Pretoria a year later, the Pistorius standing in the dock, who had already admitted shooting Steenkamp by mistake in the middle of the night, through a bathroom door, was as unfamiliar to me as I was probably to him. Gone were the iconic carbon-fibre running blades, the instruments which made him such a story for a sportswriter. He had also shed much of his elite athlete's muscle – around 15kg, his agent told me. The Pistorius I knew was being stripped away, the runner without legs and hero of triumph over adversity shrinking, disappearing with every accusation of violence and anger.
South Africa lost Nelson Mandela in 2013, and South Africans knew it was inevitable that they would one day mourn their ageing statesman. The way South Africa is losing the Oscar Pistorius it once had and adored could be more traumatic.
