By Guardian - Emine Saner - Mon 17 Jun 2024 05.00 BST

Born with disabilities in the shadow of Chornobyl, she spent her early life in an orphanage that was also a brothel. Then Masters was adopted, and thrived, becoming a phenomenal rower, skier and cyclist.

You wouldn’t necessarily expect an injury to a finger to derail an entire competition season and threaten to end a sporting career, but this is the situation Oksana Masters, the US Paralympic skier and cyclist, found herself in last year. “I’ve had injuries and I’m used to missing time, but not a whole year like that,” she says. “I underestimated the mental side.” But in a life as traumatic and triumphant as Masters’, a broken finger is just one more obstacle to be overcome.

She was born in Ukraine in 1989, with a range of disabilities caused by radiation from the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, and spent the first part of her childhood in an orphanage, enduring unimaginable emotional, physical and sexual abuse. When, as an eight-year-old, she was adopted by an American woman, it was finally the start of a happy family life – but it was also challenging to adapt to a new country. Masters underwent multiple operations, including having both her legs amputated.

Her finger, which she broke during a ski race in Canada, would be fairly simple to fix in someone able-bodied, but Masters’ hands are different; this was the strongest finger on her strongest hand, and the one she relied on because she doesn’t have thumbs. Three operations failed, “because my anatomy is fighting against the repair”, she says. “I’m going to eventually have to have it permanently fused to my middle finger.” Her surgeon, who previously successfully worked on her broken elbow, warned her that she was now in the realm of pursuing competitive success at the risk of damaging her body permanently.

It has also meant relearning how to do everything from taking lids off jars to skiing and gripping her bike handles. “This will be my biggest hurdle leading into Paris,” she says of the upcoming Paralympics, “relearning everything.” But because this is Masters, resilient and tough, things are looking good; when we speak on a video call, it’s not long after she has triumphed at a Para-Nordic World Cup race in Italy.

How does she keep going through every trauma, every setback? She smiles. “I think it’s ingrained in me from such a young age … a lot of it stems from growing up with: ‘You can’t walk and you won’t be able to do this and that,’ and me not accepting that. That’s the cool thing, which I think a lot of people don’t realise, about Paralympians, myself or my teammates or any Paralympian in the world: we’re constantly adapting to our environment, because the world was never created for us.”

Masters is one of the most successful Paralympians ever: first in rowing, in which she won bronze for the US at London 2012, and then in cycling where she picked up two gold medals at Tokyo 2020, as well as multiple medals in cross-country skiing and biathlon (skiing and rifle-shooting). She will be cycling this summer at Paris 2024, but couldn’t she retire quite happily now?

“No!” she says with a laugh. “I need to be in Paris. I have achieved a lot and been so fortunate, but what I haven’t achieved yet is that perfect race; when I say ‘perfect’, it’s when I would, for the first time, be proud of my race and myself and not change a single thing. Whether that lands me on the podium or in last place, that’s what I’m chasing.” In cycling especially, Masters says she feels she has a lot to prove.

Unlike many athletes, Masters openly admits to self-doubt. “My teammates and coaches say I’m my hardest critic, and expect too much sometimes in crazy situations with a broken elbow or having had surgery.” After Rio 2016, when she finished fourth and fifth in her hand-cycling events, she wondered if she should still be trying again. But even if she’s won a gold medal, the first thing she asks her coach is where she could have been better.

“My mom gets upset with me. She’s like: ‘Be happy for yourself.’” Masters thinks it’s a legacy of her childhood and her fight for survival. “The minute I got happy, or was proud of something, it gets taken away from you. But that’s not healthy and not sustainable as an athlete. I’m learning. Going into Paris, I am trying to believe in myself and be proud of what I’ve already achieved.”

As a young child, Masters was painfully aware of her abandonment. Other children at the home would get to go to relatives for holidays and birthdays, and some of the carers (to use the term loosely) would taunt her. “Some would say: ‘You’re ugly, you don’t deserve a home, your parents didn’t want you.’

I started realising my birth parents made a conscious decision not to keep me and felt that it was my fault.” Several families tried unsuccessfully to adopt Masters. On the days prospective adoptive parents visited the orphanage in eastern Ukraine, Masters would be carefully dressed, with bows in her hair, and given more food. It became enough, to her, that she wouldn’t be as hungry as usual that day.

The fear of abandonment has never left, even though her mother, Gay Masters, an academic, sounds incredibly loving and supportive, as does her fiance, fellow Paralympian Aaron Pike. “I bonded to my mom but my fear is she did not bond to me and will choose to leave me. Not just her, but anyone close to me. I have a hard time letting people get close; it was the way I protected myself for so many years.”

In her 2023 memoir The Hard Parts, Masters writes about the extreme deprivation – the cold, the hunger, the lack of affection – as well as the abuse. She decided to keep a lot of things that happened to her out of the book, “because I just don’t think people would have the stomach for it, and I don’t think they need to know details of everything to understand the big picture”.

What she does write about is horrific. She says her best friend, Lainey, was beaten to death in front of her after she tried to take some bread. Until then, Masters realises now, Lainey had been responsible for her survival. “She was my family, she taught me what love is and what safety feels like. I didn’t realise how bad things were until she had gone.” The upstairs of the orphanage, Masters writes, was run as a brothel. She was five when she started to be taken up there.

Sometimes she would be beaten so badly, it wouldn’t have taken much more to kill her. “All I wanted was to die, but I also wanted a mom; that ounce of hope was there and that’s just what I held on to. Seeing some kids leave and going to families, part of me hoped this would be me too.”

It was around this time that Gay Masters navigated two years of frustration, corruption and bureaucracy, having set her heart on adopting this little girl she’d first seen in a grainy photograph. “Even though it was easy for her to give up, and people encouraged her to, she never did,” says her daughter. “We could not be more opposite as humans – I love to be competitive and push my body, and she’s more into reading and using the mind – but her example taught me to fight for myself, as a female with a disability, and then as an athlete.”

When Masters was brought to the US, she had to learn certain feelings. “I didn’t know I was hungry, because I had learned how to suppress those feelings. My mom had to teach me what the word ‘happy’ meant when I told her what these weird feelings were. I just didn’t know how to put a word to it.” Going to school, Masters became aware of her differences: her inability to speak English, her disabilities.

“I knew my body hurt, but I didn’t know I was disabled. I went to school and people were asking: ‘Why do you walk different? You look different.’” It was harder as a teenager, by now living in Kentucky. “In the summer, it was hot and I’d be wearing long-sleeve sweatshirts and pants to cover up everything and really struggling with a lot of self-esteem issues.”

When she was 13, someone suggested she try adaptive rowing. “I was so angry, because I felt like it was another box to be put in and labelled.” But she found she loved it. “It was my safe place to process my anger and frustration at being disabled, not being included, being excluded from my school volleyball team and dance team tryouts. When you pull, you feel the force of the water on the oars; that was my way to scream and let everything out. But then when the oar comes out of the water, I feel that instant release.”

She had been having counselling, but found rowing much more effective. “I had spent my entire life with everyone telling me what I’m capable of, what medications I need to be on to be normal mentally. When I was by myself on the water, it was the only place that I really got to fully determine where it goes. I could see if it was a messy stroke, or if it was perfect. The effort I put in and what I get out is all on me. When you haven’t had that for the first 13 years of your life, it’s pretty powerful.”

She was a successful rower, but back pain forced her to give it up, which was hard; instead, she was encouraged to try skiing and biathlon. Her dream is to get to Los Angeles in 2028 – “my home Games, if I can keep myself in one piece”. The Paralympics, she says, has given her a sense of belonging. “

It ignited a passion to continue to advocate for my community, for athletes with disabilities, to be seen as elite level, not as just [she puts on a patronising voice], ‘Wow, that’s amazing that you’re out there and you’re trying!’ To show the world what is truly possible with the human spirit and body, and it’s OK to do it differently.”

Through sport, she learned to cherish her body. “I’ve learned how to love myself, appreciate my unique abilities, and my body has given me the strength to do so many different things.” She loves being recognised in public by people, “and they’re saying the word ‘Paralympics’, they understand it as much as the Olympics. There are so many young athletes that have acquired injuries, or a disability, who say: ‘I want to be a Paralympic athlete.’ That’s worth it. A whole community of athletes came before me to make it what it is, and I feel so lucky to help continue that legacy.”

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Masters was about to leave for the Beijing Winter Paralympics. She watched the news all night, in tears; she has always felt fiercely proud of being Ukrainian, despite her childhood experiences. For Paris 2024, Russian and Belarusian teams are banned but individual athletes will be allowed to compete as neutrals. “Honestly, I’m torn,” says Masters. “A lot of the way athletes and sports are supported in Russia is through the military. They’re able to train safely, they have the infrastructure, they have homes and families. But athletes are athletes; they are not responsible for it.”

One day she hopes to go back to Ukraine, to find out more about the circumstances of her birth and relinquishment, and she says she hopes there is a Ukraine to go back to. “In my teenage years, I filled my mind with all this anger and hatred towards my birth parents because I made up the story of why they must have done this, or what did I do to deserve this?

But what does any child do to deserve stuff like that? That’s not a healthy way to live because there’s so much I don’t know. I know it’s not my fault, but it’s hard not to think, ‘What did I do wrong?’ I think that’s something I won’t be able to have closure on until I go back.”

Would she ever consider pursuing justice against those who abused her? “I seek vengeance on those specific people, but if they’re not dead, then that’s their thing they have to live with. I wish they were held accountable. Most likely they never will be.” It’s bigger than her, she says.

By sharing those scary, hard and ugly parts of my life, I hope it shines a light, that people acknowledge and change it because [abuse] isn’t something that’s unique to Ukraine; this happens in foster care all over the world, this happens in homes. It needs to be talked about more, and to protect kids who don’t have control and a voice.” Young people have contacted her about their own recent experiences. “It is scary, because these are young kids – they’re teenagers or early 20s. It still happens.”

She has plans: to advocate for disabled people, and for children in care. She’d like to open a coffee shop one day, and be a mother. For now, though, all her focus is on Paris. Of course she wants to win, for her team as much as for herself, but she adds: “A medal is not going to define me and I need to remind myself that I have nothing more to prove. But that is so much easier said than done.”

When she was a child in Ukraine, what she wanted more than anything was a mother. “That’s all I wanted and it’s exactly what I got. No gold medal is going to come close to that.” Her life path has been beyond dreams, hasn’t it? “Yeah, I honestly …” She smiles. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes.

Every day I remember my life before, and to see where I was, to now, where people are actually listening and hopefully I have a voice and can make an impact, it feels like a fairytale.”

Editors comments.

Oksana Masters stands as a paragon of resilience and determination. Emerging from the shadows of Chernobyl with disabilities, she endured a harrowing childhood in an orphanage that doubled as a brothel. Yet, her indomitable spirit saw her through, and she was adopted into a loving home where she blossomed.

Her journey from those dark beginnings to becoming a world-class athlete in rowing, skiing, and cycling is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Oksana Masters not only conquered her circumstances but soared above them, exemplifying the extraordinary heights the human spirit can reach. Her story is a testament to the power of perseverance and the unyielding pursuit of dreams.

Oksana Masters, your journey from the shadows to the pinnacle of athletic excellence is truly inspiring. May your future be filled with even greater triumphs, both on and off the field. Wishing you all the luck as you continue to break barriers and set new records. Your courage and determination light the way for many. Keep soaring high!