At the 2012 London Olympics, before 80,000 roaring fans and a constellation of camera flashes, it took Oscar Pistorius 45.44 seconds to become a global icon.
The South African’s sprint around the 400m track was the first time in history that a double-amputee had raced at the Olympic Games. 
The race capped an Olympian triumph over adversity for Pistorius. His journey from disabled child to world-class athlete seemed to embody the very best of sporting endeavour and the human spirit.
Then on Valentine’s Day in 2013 his achievements were just as quickly demolished.
In the early hours of the morning at his upmarket Pretoria home, he shot and killed his 29-year-old model girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, later saying he believed her to be an intruder.
His sparkling career was cut short, sponsors dumped him and he was forced to sell his homes in the face of mounting legal bills. 
The “Blade Runner” - an epithet earned for his trademark prosthetic legs that powered him to fame as a Paralympic gold medallist - 
became the “Blade Gunner.”
“He’s not only broke, but he is broken, there is nothing left,” lawyer Barry Roux told his sentencing hearing last month.
Time and again during his trial, the court was told about “two Oscars” - one a hero, the other a victim. 
But the high-profile proceedings also exposed the 29-year-old’s darker side: offering glimpses of a dangerously volatile man with a penchant for guns, beautiful women and fast cars.
In 2009, he spent a night in jail after allegedly assaulting a 19-year-old woman at a party in a case that was settled out of court. 
Two years later, he was accused of firing a gun through the sunroof of an ex-girlfriend’s moving car. 
Weeks before he shot Steenkamp, he discharged a gun by accident at a Johannesburg restaurant. 
Pistorius has long been open about his love for guns. The sprinter slept with a pistol under his bed at his home in a high-security estate for fear of burglars.
Once held in Amsterdam after gunpowder residue was detected on his prosthetics, he also took a New York Times journalist interviewing him to a shooting range.
The writer described him driving at 250km (155 miles) an hour, double the speed limit, and referred to Pistorius as having “a fierce, even frenzied need to take on the world at maximum speed and with minimum caution”.
His passion for motorbikes, adrenaline and speed is well documented. “He likes fast cars. He is just built for speed,” his trainer Jannie Brooks said. 
He also crashed his boat on a river, breaking two ribs, an eye socket and his jaw. Empty alcohol bottles were found in the boat. 
He once owned two white tigers but sold them to a zoo in Canada when they became too big.
Born in 1986 in Johannesburg without fibulas (calf bones), his parents decided when he was 11 months old to have his legs amputated below the knee so he could be fitted with prosthetic legs.