All eyes will be on Oscar Pistorius at the grand prix meeting in Shef-field this evening, which is no different from the rest of his life but still not how he likes it. “I want to be treated exactly the same as any other athlete who was running my time,” he says. “I want the other guys to play their mental games with me, I don’t want them doing anything different. I have to prove myself.”

Except in his own mind, which could have been forged in his father’s zinc mine, Pistorius has nothing to prove. His appearance alongside the world and Olympic champion, Jeremy Wariner, in the 400m field at the Norwich Union British Grand Prix is, in its way, the end rather than the beginning of an incredible journey. Hollywood has already come calling and last week he was stalked by the paparazzi in Iceland. But the 20-year-old from Johannesburg, billed as the “fastest man on no legs”, is sitting in the offices of the grand prix organisers in London and talking lucidly not just about qualifying for the Olympics in Beijing next summer, but if he fails to do that – and failure was not a word much encouraged in the Pistorius household – of his hopes for returning to London as an Olympian in 2012. Potentially, he could compete in three Games, one of the reasons why the International Athletics Federation (IAAF) is taking its time over a ruling on his utterly unique talent.

The irony not lost on the South African is that the faster he runs in his first international able-bodied race, the more dangerous he becomes to the athletics community. If Pistorius is allowed to compete in the Olympics on his carbon-fibre running blades, specially made at a cost of £15,000 a pair, what are the implications for the sport, not just tomorrow but in 20 or 30 years’ time when the technology has moved on? How natural is it that a double amputee should be running times for the 400m which put him within half a second of Olympic qualification? How extraordinary, in other words, is Oscar Pistorius?

None of this is new territory for Pistorius. He has been battling perceptions of his worth since an operation at the age of 11 months forced him to explore the boundaries of possibility on prosthetic legs. Except in scale, this evening will mirror countless afternoons on the rugby field or in the water polo pool when Pistorius’s ability to compete confounded and confused opponents and spectators in roughly equal measure.

Twice a week, Pistorius recalls, he had to persuade a group of boys from another school that he was quite normal and, as it happens, pretty talented. By the time they had worked it out, rationalised their own feelings, Pistorius’s high school team had made off with the spoils. “It’s natural that people feel sorry for you,” he says. “But it got to the point where I realised I could do most things better than most able-bodied people. If you ask me today if I’d want to have my legs back, I’d have to sit down seriously and think about it. Being an amputee, growing up with my disability has made me the person I am.”

One of the problems with Pistorius is that he has such a profound and positive vision of his capabilities that it is easy to treat his rise to the epicentre of athletic achievement as rather less than awesome, to borrow one of his favourite words.

But Henke, his father, can remember all too clearly the anguished whimpers of his young son after the operation and the agony he and his wife, Sheila, endured before deciding that their second son, the one with the ticklish feet, but only two toes and no calf bones or ankles, should spend the rest of his life without legs. As revenge for the injustice, the phrase “I can’t” was banned from the vocabulary of the Pistorius family.

The debate over Pistorius’s future has largely obscured his struggle with the past. “My self-image, my self-consciousness, that was really an issue,” he says. “But almost overnight it changed. I realised I wasn’t going to wake up with legs, so I’d better deal with it. I suppose I was about 12 at the time. After a while at school I was just like any other guy, ‘Oh, that’s Wesley, that’s Oscar’. Now people in South Africa read about me so much, they don’t think twice.

“It’s only here or in the US that I attract more attention. The only thing that frustrates me at home now is if I walk in the supermarket after training and kids are staring and parents don’t want them to stare. I just go up to them and say, ‘Hey, I’m Oscar and I’ve got artificial legs’, because that’s the only way people will be educated about it.”

Becoming accepted at school, mostly through his natural talent for sport, was one aspect of his life that Pistorius could control. Less easily understood were his parents’ divorce early in his childhood and the death of his mother after an allergic reaction to hospital treatment for malaria five years ago. It’s not an area of his past he cares to explore much, but he still cherishes the letters his mother wrote to him and feels her spirit within him when he runs. “A loser,” she once wrote, “is not the one who runs last in the race, it is the one who sits and watches.”

“She had an answer for everything, she gave me so much guidance,” Pistorius says. “She was more like a friend than a mother. She was sick for a month before she died. I remember my rugby coach came into one of my history classes and told me to get my stuff because my dad was going to be here in five minutes. I knew it was bad. On the journey to the hospital, one of my mum’s friends phoned and said we had to hurry because it wouldn’t be long. We were at the hospital for 15 minutes before she passed away. My life was turned upside down, but it was hardest for my younger sister, who had been living with mum the whole time. The anniversaries were the worst – you know, one week, two weeks, one month, Mother’s Day, her birthday, Christmas. I’m happy with where she is now, she can still watch my races.

“People say things happen for a reason. They don’t. They happen so you can learn from them. The outcome is decided by what you want to do. You could use all of what’s happened as a reason to fail, people would understand. ‘You’ve got no legs, your mother died, such a shame’. But I don’t want to live my life with people saying that’s too bad, filling my life with all those negatives.

“I’m a Paralympic world record holder and that’s a title I’m so proud of. I’ve not just sat at home.”

Henke was a strong but distant figure in Oscar’s childhood, a man who encouraged rational debate, not emotional spasm. If Oscar wanted to ride a motor-bike without legs, Henke wanted a list of reasons for the choice. If Oscar was bullied, he was on his own, protected more by his elder brother, Carl, than his father. That was the way it had to be, in Henke’s eyes. “Some of my mentality comes from him, for sure,” says Pistorius. “If you believe in something, don’t let it die and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, but you have to have the facts on the table.”

Yet fate played the biggest part in determining Pistorius’s future. In particular, a pass from his outside-centre one afternoon on the rugby field which arrived just as his opposite wing flew into him from one side and another opponent landed on his leg from the other. The rupture of the leg muscle forced him out of rugby and took him to the door of an athletics coach, who had already produced two Paralympic gold medallists.

“I went to the track and I didn’t have the right kit or anything,” he says. “But they entered me for a race about three or four weeks later, January 5, 2004, and I broke the Paralympic world record for double amputees, right off the bat, in rugby shorts and a T-shirt.”

That was just the start of his record-breaking. Pistorius holds the Paralympic records for double amputees at 100, 200 and 400 metres, lowering the mark for the 400m by 11 seconds for double amputees and five seconds for single amputees. In 2004, his victory in the 200m in Athens, won in a world record time, was watched by Dr Gerry Versveld, the surgeon who had operated on Pistorius’s legs. Sitting next to Henke in the stands, both were reduced to tears.

For the past three seasons, Pistorius has been running in able-bodied meetings in South Africa, finishing second in the 400m at the recent national championships and reducing his personal best, 46.34sec, to within touching distance of the qualifying standard for the world championships in Osaka this summer. Only six British athletes bettered that time last year, justification enough for Fast Track, the organisers of the Norwich Union grand prix, to launch Pistorius onto a wider public stage this weekend. If he runs to his best, Jon Ridgeon, the managing director of Fast Track, estimates Pistorius will come in 10-15m behind the winner.

Pistorius hopes that Wariner can pull him into running the qualifying time for the world championships. More significantly for the long-term future of Paralympic athletes, the IAAF will video the race to analyse Pistorius’s stride length and to determine whether his lightweight car-bon-fibre blades, inspired by the curve of a cheetah’s back legs and manufactured by Ossur, a company based in Reykjavik, give him any unfair advantage.

“If the IAAF ever found anything that says I run at an advantage then I am willing to quit athletics,” he says. “I don’t want to be known as a guy with an unfair advantage. That would be like an athlete being found guilty of taking steroids and still being allowed to run.

“Everyone has been pretty good about it until you start beating them. But I want everyone to know the facts. I sat down myself and wrote the facts on a piece of paper, consulted people who made the running legs, people who have the knowledge about biokinetics, and there was not one thing that pointed to me having an advantage. The technology has been around for 14 years now, the blades are passive devices so they can’t give out energy, I don’t have a heel action which is why my starts are so slow and though I can’t build up lactic acid in my calf muscles, I can in my hamstrings and my back. My ratio of blood to muscle is exactly the same as anyone else’s. So I don’t understand why my times are so way ahead of all the others. I’m happy to do any tests the IAAF want me to do.”

Pistorius gains inspiration from the kids in Mozambique he teaches to walk through the Mineseeker charity supported by Nelson Mandela and Brad Pitt. Recently, he visited the Track and Field Hall of Fame in the US, watched every video and admired the running shoes of Carl Lewis and the modest bril-liance of Jesse Owens.

He will try to keep to his routine, strapping on his blades while ignoring the stares and focusing not on the array of world-class talent around him but on his own capabilities. This is the Pretoria High School playing fields, merely magnified a little. “This is like taking three hurdles all at once,” he says. “I could have chickened out, but where do you go from there? I’m privileged to be racing these guys. They’re the best in the world and it would be stupid not to take it as a massive learning curve and a great experience. The world championship qualification time is 45.95, I’ve run 46.34 this year.

“Yes, I do sense a fear of what I might do. I’m 20, I’ve been running 47 seconds since the age of 19 and I’ve only been doing 400m for three years. I’ve got a lot of time ahead of me. If I don’t make it to Beijing, I’ve got another four years and I hope to make it then.

“The other day I was so tired after training, I didn’t have the strength to turn on the ignition on my car, I had to get a friend to do it for me. The body has to get to that point that it knows, whether it likes it or not, it’s going to have to do something. But that brings an awesome sense of satisfaction as well.” He shrugs strong shoulders, then laughs. “If I don’t make it in the next 10 years, then I’m in deep water. But at least I tried.”

Black calls for ban

Former European 400m champion Roger Black, says that Oscar Pistorius should not be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games. Black said that nobody could be sure whether or not the double amputee’s artificial legs gave him an advantage over able-bodied athletes and was concerned that giving the South African the go-ahead to compete in Beijing next year could set a worrying precedent. ‘My main concern is over how things will move on with the technology in the future,’ said Black, who believes there could come a time when artificial limbs such as the blades used by Pistorius will give disabled athletes an unfair advantage over their rivals.