'I was lucky to make it out the orphanage': Oksana Masters' extraordinary journey
The home gym is built out, Netflix and Hulu have been trawled to their depths, and Paralympic champion Oksana Masters is nostalgic for Taco Tuesdays at restaurants near her seasonal base in Illinois. Most of all, she is missing the rush of competition, the buzz at the core of her identity since she first sat in a rowing boat as a teenager.
Her story began in Ukraine in 1989. In a likely legacy of the radiation spewed by the Chernobyl disaster three years earlier, she was born with one kidney, a partial stomach, six toes on each foot and webbed fingers on each thumbless hand. Her left leg was six inches shorter than her right and shinbones were absent in both.
Given up for adoption by her birth family, she lived in three orphanages before she was adopted at the age of seven by Gay Masters, a single American woman who brought her to the US after a fraught two-year process.
In Survivor, a video published in March on the Players’ Tribune website, Masters opens up about the sustained physical, emotional and sexual abuse she endured in Ukraine.
“I just thought I would be able to help other girls, other kids who live in orphanages who went through this and didn’t know how to heal. And the power of sport – that’s what sports gave me, it gave me my way to heal and let everything out and find myself and rediscover myself in a positive way. And change the narrative of my story,” she says.
“I also realise that there’s so many parts of me that are still healing, there are some parts of my story that are not out there that will forever stay just for me, but there is also power in talking and releasing and saying things and sharing because I am one of the lucky ones who made it out of the orphanage.
“If my story could help in some way shine a light into one specific orphanage or a system and changes those kids’ lives forever, then that, I can’t even put that into words how much that would mean to me.”
Her left leg was amputated when she was nine; the right, five years later. “In middle school someone told me about the adaptive rowing club and I hated the fact that it was adaptive and I did not want to do that at all. I loved the idea of sport but I did not love the idea of being told I had to do an adaptive sport just because I was on a single leg at that time,” she says.
“Finally my mom was like, just go and try it. The minute I got in the water and pushed away from the dock it was just like a feeling that I got, where it was just the right place at the right time. I loved the pulling of the oars and the release that I got… I wanted to go as hard as I could, of course.”
Complications from the second amputation meant she spent about five months in hospital. “I couldn’t get out of bed and that’s the one thing I wanted to do, was to get back on the water. And I was just thinking to myself, the minute I can get out of here I am never going to stop, I am never going to sit in one place ever again like this,” she recalls.
“I got back on the water and it definitely was a way for me to let out my emotions, the anger and frustration I had of losing my second leg and then, as dreams and things were coming back from Ukraine, it was a way for me to just scream without needing to scream. To release things without physically, verbally, saying the things that were hurting me inside.”
Masters has flourished as a multisport athlete after some hardscrabble early days. She drove to Colorado for cross-country skiing training ahead of the 2014 Winter Paralympics but misjudged the costs. Too embarrassed to ask anyone for help, she slept in her car.
Six years and seven Paralympic medals later, the arrangements were a little more swanky in Berlin earlier this year, where she was feted by famous names as she was named Sportsperson of the Year with a Disability at the Laureus World Sports Awards.
That was February; in March, as the planet convulsed, the 2020 Para Biathlon World Championships were abruptly cancelled and she scrambled back to the US from Sweden. Borders closed, horizons narrowed, and, after weeks of uncertainty coalesced into inevitability, Tokyo 2020 moved to 2021.
The postponement has provoked worries about the financial health of the Paralympics, though Masters is confident that the host nation will embrace the event with as much relish as
the British in 2012, when she and her American teammate, Rob Jones, won a rowing bronze in mixed double sculls. “The world has another year to learn more stories of so many Paralympic athletes out there and get even more excited,” says Masters, reliably upbeat.
Aware of the platform afforded by her growing profile, Masters recently joined the athlete advisory panel of the Women’s Sports Foundation, the US-based equality advocacy group founded by Billie Jean King in 1974.
The 31-year-old is also studying for a business degree and has long-term plans to pursue an MBA and open a mobile coffee shop fashioned from an Airstream trailer. Before that, when public training and competitions and Taco Tuesdays are routine again, there is business of the unfinished kind.
Masters took up para-cycling after Sochi, hoping it would help with fitness following a back injury. Oksana being Oksana, she qualified for the Rio Games in 2016, finishing fourth in the road race. And again, Oksana being Oksana, she was racked with regret at missing the podium. Still is. So her sights are set on the time trial, road race and relay in Tokyo.
“I’m definitely really motivated to prove to myself, to my team, that I am a cyclist. Rio, I came so close, I was fourth and I was watching the third place finisher cross the line and it killed me inside so much because I knew exactly what I did wrong,” she says.
Naturally, Masters is eying a gold medal to boost a Paralympic tally that stands at eight: the rowing bronze from London, a silver and a bronze in crosscountry skiing at Sochi, two golds and a bronze in cross-country and two biathlon silvers at Pyeongchang in 2018.
“I like to set the bar unrealistically high,” she says. Though, given where she has come from, what she has achieved and what may still be ahead, the bar already seems not so much set as shattered.