(Article by Kevin McCallum at www.iol.co.za)

Disabled, disgusted and disaffected. South Africa’s Paralympic athletes have lashed out at the team’s administration after arriving in Beijing to find no training kit, no equipment and the “ugliest outfit ever seen” for the Games’ opening ceremony on Saturday.

A furious Oscar Pistorius, speaking from the athletes’ village in Beijing on Tuesday, said athletes had been forced to train in tracksuit pants in sweltering hot conditions because there was no official team kit for them to train in.

“It’s absolutely unacceptable and unprofessional,” said Pistorius.

“We’ve been asking them for months where the team kit is and they told us it would be here when we arrived in Beijing.

“When we got to Beijing on Sunday, they told us the kit hadn’t arrived yet and would be here two days before we actually compete (on Sunday). They told us we didn’t have to train in the official outfits and could use our own stuff. But none of us had brought kit because we were told it was going to be supplied, so the guys have been running around in this heat in tracksuit pants. That means we will have been training in the same clothes for five days.

“Every country gets hydration packs from the organisers, and for some reason we haven’t got ours. I’ve asked and I just get a blank stare. So you’ve got guys on crutches walking about 2km to get water from the dining hall.”

Also, on the South African Airways flight to Hong Kong, officials took up business class seats, leaving athletes with crutches and prosthetics crammed in economy for 13 hours. Some athletes were still feeling the effects, said Pistorius.

“You’ve got big blokes, like Fanie Lombaard, who are crammed into these small seats, when they could have had an easier flight in business. That means extra time stretching and the potential of a cricked back. Arnu Fourie (a below-the-knee amputee) hasn’t been able to put his leg on yet to train because his stump is (still) so swollen.”

The team is managed by the South African Sport Confederation and Olympic Committee (Sascoc), which was criticised for its management of the Olympic team.

The team’s chef de mission, Les Williams, is the president of South African korfbal and has little experience in dealing with disabled athletes.

It is Sascoc policy that a Sascoc board member is named chef de mission of South African teams.

Contacted on Tuesday, an official at Sascoc’s Joburg headquarters sounded taken aback and said Pistorius was not supposed to speak on Sascoc matters because he “had signed a contract”.

They confirmed the team’s kit was still in Joburg, and was due to be sent out only today.

The South African Olympic team’s opening ceremony outfit was voted as the fourth-worst in Beijing, and the Paralympic team’s attire seems destined to better that by being named as the ugliest.

The athletes took such exception to an outfit they describe as “cheap linen pajamas that no one would want to sleep in” that they drew up a petition, announcing they would not wear it.

Management allegedly got wind of the petition, however, and registered the outfit yesterday afternoon so that it could not be changed.

“I don’t know how they expect us to wear something so ugly. It’s going to be embarrassing for the country to have us walking in front of millions of people in that. We wanted to wear the suits they gave us for the farewell banquet, but they didn’t want to listen to us.”

When the team management were contacted for comment on Tuesday, a “Patience” answered the phone in the South African office in the athletes’ village and repeated that Pistorius was “not allowed to talk about Sascoc because he has signed a contract with us”.

Pistorius is expected to bring back at least two gold medals from Beijing, while the team is quietly predicting 15 golds in total.

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