MARK ETHERIDGE: Spare parts and happy hearts

Every athlete in the SA team at this year’s World Transplant Games in Australia had more than their own teammates to celebrate with.

Each one of them would have celebrated that they were alive and competing, due to another person’s vital organ now being part of their bodies.

Rentia le Roux was one of 35 South Africans who flew the flag in Perth recently.

These were her third Games (staged over six days), having competed in Malaga, Spain, in 2017 and then Newcastle, England, two years later.

It’s the 24th iteration of the Transplant Games and 45 countries were represented.

A 54-year-old mother of two, the Cape Town athlete will bring back five medals for the Rainbow Nation when she returns after a short post-championships holiday Down Under.

She won bronze in the 100m and 200m sprint events, and sealed silver in the long jump, ball-throw and javelin.

Those were part of a 41-medal haul for the South Africans, made up of nine gold, 21 silver and 11 bronze.

Le Roux was born in Stellenbosch but raised in the nearby Boland town of Worcester, attending the local primary school and then the commercial high school.

Her journey to transplant sport started in 2002 when she was diagnosed with kidney disease due to an unknown cause and started undergoing treatment by her doctor until early 2011.

“My kidneys finally gave up in early in 2011 and then on 22 September that year I received a kidney ... from my sister Carolyn,” she says from Adelaide.

“She’s 10 years older than me and remains my hero until this day.”

Carolyn will celebrate her 65th birthday on September 25, meaning her birthday is just three days later than the celebration of another successful year of Rentia’s transplant.

Two positive souls, just six months after the transplant, the two sisters did a 5km fun walk in March of 2012 ... “and we ended up doing it every year, just to celebrate our health”.

“Walking soon turned out to jogging and I went as far as running the Two Oceans half-marathon after being asked by the Cape Kidney Association to raise both awareness and funds,” she says.

She’s since run another half-marathon.

“My first SA Transplant Games were in 2014 and then three years later I did my first World Games.”

At those first Games in Malaga she won medals in two of her events (100m sprint, and ball-throw) and then in Newcastle she repeated her medal-winning feats in the 100m, long jump and javelin, in which she holds the world record.

Now living in Protea Heights, Brackenfell, in Cape Town’s northern suburbs, like every transplant recipient she has to take daily medication.

“I’m a ‘home executive’ but keep myself busy by being chair of the Western Cape Transplant Sports Association because I like putting back into my sport as well.

“In terms of my medication, I take six pills in the morning and three in the evening. I am on low-dosage medication. Some other transplantees take way more than me.

“So if my health continues to be as good as it is now ... I’m sure I have a few more Games in me.”

Every athlete at these Games has a highlight but Le Roux’s is a far-reaching one and not totally related to her own performance.

She explains: “I’m 1.6m tall, not tall by any means but on the Friday, the first day of the athletics programme, I was approached by a Brazilian lady with her team manager.

“She said she had first seen me running the sprints at the Newcastle version of the Games. She’s also quite short and said she’d always been led to believe that sprinters are tall and lean — not ‘short and not so lean’.

“She said that seeing me do so well in Newcastle had inspired her to also start training for the 100m.

“Her name is Luciane de Lima and as it turned out we both won bronze medals in the 100m event, her in the 40-49 age-group and me in the 50-59 age group, which made me so, so happy to have been an inspiration.”

One of the characters in the animated series, Care Bears, was credited as saying: “Sharing is caring” in one of the episodes

In the case of the Le Roux sisters and De Lima it couldn’t be more apt.