Evans Maripa watched me flop into a seat at court seven of the Paralympic tennis courts and asked: “Are you having fun?”
I had 40 minutes to spare before I jumped on a bus north to watch Ntando Mahlangu run at the Olympic Stadium. There is a bus every hour from outside the main press centre at 20 minutes past the hour. It should take 40 minutes to get there. It takes 30. Ayrton Senna lives on in the bus drivers of Rio.
It is very easy to get sucked into the two vortexes of athletics and swimming when you are a South African hack at the Olympics or Paralympics. You look at the schedule, suss out the medal chances, and pick what you will attend. If you are the only South African journalist at the Rio Paralympics, you opt for swimming and athletics.
The time between the morning sessions in the pool and on the track feels like a dead zone. I had some time. I decided to watch the tennis for the second time this week. I stopped by to speak to Leon Els, who had been on the way to becoming a professional rugby player before the minibus he was in, was hit head-on by a driver overtaking a truck. His back was broken, his rugby dream was over. He found tennis.
While the athletes roll around with some style and grace, the volunteers roped into to being the ball boys and girls do not. None of them are boys nor girls. They are adults, and they are adults who have never caught a ball in their lives. These were the last ones to get picked for teams at lunch at school. Els thundered a ball into the net on a serve. The 30-something Brazilian mama chased the ball as it rolled away from her. She reached down to grab it on the run, but it kept getting away from her. Panicked, she tried to kick it off the court, but missed. The umpire stopped play and gave her 15 seconds to catch the ball before she ended up running off the court.
I watched KG Montjane play her second round match against Zhenzhen Zhu, one of the best names I have ever got to say out loud. The South African lost the first set, and when I arrived was breaking back in the second. Wheelchair tennis is quicker than you think.
Montjane won the second set and then built up a lead in the third. She played a drop shot from the baseline that was sublime, plunging over the net like a waterfall and spinning back viciously. I left when she was ahead, to catch the Senna Express north.
Mahlangu was waiting. He did the “Caster”, crouched, touched and engaged. He was well behind after 30m. Through the bend his legs fought the turn as he goose-stepped into full speed. He swings from his hips in the run, and he swung them quicker than anyone else in those final 80m. When he was done he laughed.
He was having fun.
The Star