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Running Jonny's road to recovery
By Mike Hurst, 12 September 2003Courageous runners will hit the road from North Sydney to Olympic Park on Sunday morning – but few are as inspirational as blind marathoner Jonny Demas. On his 4½-hour trek his aim is to collect friends rather than medals or records – although he has a few of those – in the process of completing the Flora Sydney Marathon.
South African Demas was blinded at 26, the victim of an unprovoked attack. It was a case of mistaken identity that left him in a coma for 45 days. He was bashed with a "panga" – an enormous butchers knife – by a gang of thugs on the street in Wesbury, a black township near Johannesburg, where he was left for dead. For the next 13 years he fell into depression over his blindness until he found a fuller life through a running club in Johannesburg called Jardine Joggers.
"I just jogged small distances at first, but I had always loved to run," Demas, 55, told The Daily Telegraph. "But races can be dangerous. I've had a couple of falls. I had a severe fall during the Two Oceans Marathon in Cape Town in 1989. But I could get up and run on so I completed the race."
Demas learned to run alongside a sighted "pilot" and in 1986 he ran his first marathon, meeting solicitor Richard Shakenovsky. Two years later, Shakenovsky guided him through the 90km Comrades ultra-marathon. They became a fixture in South Africa, running 50 marathons and Demas' first eight Comrades races together before Shakenovsky moved to Sydney in 1996.
"I have been missing him terribly," Shakenovsky said. "He came to trust me so much because we did so much running together."
Having run in the Olympic Test Event race – the inaugural Sydney marathon in March 2000 – Shakenovsky dreamed that some day he would pilot his old companion in his new country. That day dawns on Sunday, thanks to the generosity of Mervyn Chipkin of Bidvest Pty Ltd which has sponsored Demas' air fare and race entry.
Shakenovsky, who on arrival in Sydney formed a local chapter of the international Achilles Running Club, will pilot Demas to halfway, with new Achilles chairman Ellis Janks, a South Africa-born physiotherapist, taking over for the final 21km of the gruelling event.
"You have to be his eyes," Shakenovsky said. "A slight gradient can force him to fall, so the pilot must warn him and direct him or call out to other runners. We hope Jonny's run will encourage more people with disabilities to exercise with the Achilles club."
During his 17 years on the run, Demas has received many honours including three entries in the Guinness Book Of Records. But his greatest achievement was in raising more than $285,000 during a 161km race to build an AIDS wing for the Cotlands Baby Sanctuary for HIV-affected babies in Johannesburg.
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