“I was the smallest one there and you learned not to show any emotion, whether you were sad or happy,” says Oksana Masters as she describes the Ukrainian orphanage where she suffered terrible abuse before being rescued and taken to America.
Masters, who was born in the shadow of Chornobyl’s nuclear plant in 1989 and suffered multiple birth defects caused by radiation, is the most decorated US Paralympic athlete after excelling in four summer and winter sports, winning 17 medals.
But as she talks with wrenching emotion and extraordinary delicacy, Masters is deep inside the dark place where, as a damaged little girl whose birth parents had given her up, there was terror and pain. “I was always afraid of what would happen if I cried,” she says, “because nothing good happened in that orphanage if I cried. So you learn to laugh when, in those hard moments, you just want to cry.”
Masters and I have been talking intently, but surprisingly easily, for almost an hour. It helps I’ve read her riveting book, The Hard Parts, which explains how she was born with one kidney, a partial stomach, six toes on each foot, webbed fingers, no right biceps and no thumbs. Her left leg was six inches shorter than her right, without a tibia in either.
After Gay Masters, an American academic, adopted her, Oksana had to endure a double amputation in the US. She suffered from acute PTSD and struggled to adapt as a disabled Ukrainian refugee in suburban America, but, somehow, sport became her salvation.
The 33-year-old admits she is still haunted because the orphanage was, in her words, “an underage brothel”. Between the ages of five and seven she was taken to “the room upstairs” and subjected to sexual abuse that scarred her badly.
“I was taken there a lot,” she says. “Sometimes it was for a week straight and other timesit was less. But we were taken up there every week. When my friend Laney [another orphan who protected Oksana before she was beaten horrifically to her presumed death] went away, I realised I was going up there way more. It was weekly and then every day. We were taken there when the kids who were just part of the school, but weren’t orphans, returned to their homes. There were just the seven of us left to be taken upstairs.”
Masters ensures a difficult conversation is coherent and clear. It helps, in writing her book, that she decided to look back into the darkness. “I really contemplated why I would write about all I experienced in the orphanage because when people see me I don’t want their first thought to be: ‘Oh, she lived through that.’ But at the same time it’s very important to talk about it.
“I don’t think people know what happens in orphanages, especially poor eastern European ones, and no one wants to believe it. This is a way to shine that light by starting these conversations.”
Gay Masters gave Oksana the chance to discover a home where she could feel safe and loved. The American professor, a single woman, had wanted to adopt a child in the 1990s but it was too expensive for her to do so in the US. She turned her attention to Ukraine and when she was shown a blurry photograph of a little girl with haunting eyes, Gay became obsessed with finding her. Oksana was that girl and while she waited she was given a photograph of Gay, who spent almost three years trying to complete the adoption and emigration process.
Oksana’s face lights up as she recalls the moment she met her mother: “I remember that day so vividly when this dark, shadowy figure kneeled down next to me and I felt the pressure on the bed. You wake up and see the face of the person you’ve been staring at [in a photograph] for two years. She was there in real life and I claimed her: ‘You’re my mom.’ It was pure happiness and contentment. I felt safe in her presence instantly – without even knowing her.”
It was still traumatic for Oksana when they arrived in America. She had to bury the abuse because “I was scared my mom would send me back if she heard about all these things in the orphanage”.
As a teenager who would soon lose both legs, she began cutting herself. “One of the hardest transitions coming to America was almost the lack of pain and harm and fear. That was my normal and without it [self-harm] became an easy way to numb everything.”
Her adoptive mother coaxed her towards rowing and as soon as she sat in a boat on the water Oksana felt secure again. “I can’t imagine where I’d be without sport,” she says. “Yes, I would still have had this incredible mother, but without sport I would not have had that physically healthy way to just scream and let out all the tension. I could let it out in the gym or the boat, or on the start line, and not have to talk about it.”
Masters had not been rowing for long when she won her first Paralympic medal at London 2012. It was a stunning breakthrough and her toughness and natural sporting aptitude meant she was approached by the US Winter Paralympic programme.
They persuaded Masters to learn how to ski on her prosthetic limbs and she would win 14 Paralympic medals in biathlon and cross‑country skiing. She also won two gold medals as a cyclist at the Tokyo Summer Paralympics in 2021 after a back injury meant she could no longer row.
Her mother says she has a “Ukrainian resilience”, which was most evident before the Winter Paralympics in Pyeongchang in 2018. Masters had dislocated and broken an elbow three weeks before the Games. Her doctor told her “there would be a four-to‑eight month recovery period – for a normal person”.
But Masters, who had spent most of her life trying desperately to “fit in rather than stick out”, proved she was extraordinary. She made it to Pyeongchang and with her shattered elbow strapped up won five Paralympic medals, two of them gold.
Masters surpassed that achievement last year at the Beijing Winter Paralympics when she won seven medals, including three golds. She still felt like her heart had cracked because, just days before the Games began last February, Russia invaded Ukraine. But Masters was proud she was introduced before each event as “Oksana Masters – representing the United States and Ukraine”. All her medals were celebrated wildly by the Ukrainian Paralympians, who adopted her as an honorary teammate.
It was almost as if her medal haul was fuelled by a desire to win for Ukraine. “Absolutely,” she says, “because we left [for Beijing] on 24 February [the day the war started]. I feel so lucky because I have my Team US and then the Ukrainian athletes and coaches who always tell me: ‘We’ll cheer you on when you’re racing.’
“I’m an American-Ukrainian and I’m so proud of it, especially now that I can bring awareness of the war to the US. My mom always said my Ukrainian heart gets me through, being resilient, being tough and being a fighter. I think the world is seeing there is something special in this Ukrainian DNA.”
Masters believes as long as the war continues the International Olympic Committee should prevent Russian athletes from competing in the Paris Olympics and Paralympics next year. “There needs to be a blanket ban because over a hundred Ukrainian athletes that were in Tokyo cannot train for Paris because of fighting. Lots of Ukrainian coaches don’t have jobs and the whole training infrastructure is gone. We can’t have Russian athletes competing as if nothing has happened.”
Talking to me on Zoom from her home in Illinois, Masters sits alongside a beautiful display of sunflowers. “They are Ukraine’s national flower and my favourite,” she says with a dazzling smile.
She is thoughtful, too, when we discuss her commitment to Ukraine, even though it was where she endured such horror. “From day one with my mom I told her: ‘I’m not going to learn English. I’m a smart girl and I will teach you Ukrainian.’ I was so proud to be Ukrainian. It was not the country itself that gave me those darker experiences and memories. It was just a few bad people, caretakers and men from Russia, Poland and different areas.”
Masters recently got engaged to her longtime boyfriend, the US Paralympian Aaron Pike, and they are determined to compete in Paris. Her dream is to bow out of elite sport at the 2028 Los Angeles Paralympics, when she will be 39, but she smiles after I ask if she and Pike would like to become parents. “It’s funny you say that. I was just talking to him about it and saying: ‘What is the plan?’
“He’s so good with kids and I want to be a mom so badly. I want my mom to see me being a mom after everything she did for me. Whether it’s going to be adoption or not, it’s definitely in our future.”
She sounds almost at peace with her past and herself. “I’m in the process,” she says. “But I’m human. There are bad days when you wake up and you don’t like the way you look and you hate everything. But 99% of the time I am at peace and I remember myself in high school. I wish I could have felt then the way I feel now.”
The past was ugly, but for Masters there is beauty today. “I have this understanding now that there are so many kinds of beauty,” she says. “We just need to make them more mainstream. When I got to America my mom allowed me to pick out an animal as a pet and I chose the sickest cat. It was damaged and dying but we loved and helped it.
“I now live in a very philosophical way. I pay attention and see beauty in things we are trained to not appreciate. I can love a bare tree in the winter even though we are taught to think it’s only pretty when it is full of colours and leaves. I love dandelions even though we are told that it is a pesky weed that will not go away. But it’s also a beautiful weed.
“It’s the same as my memories. They’re like scar tissue. They’re never going to go away and certain smells and sounds will trigger them and they creep back into my head. But I’m better equipped at processing it and not letting it consume me or make me sick.
“It’s OK to struggle when you’re healing and recovering from those invisible scars and memories. You find a different strength and a different meaning behind it all. Your mindset is in a better place and you can help others by shining a light in the dark.”
The Hard Parts by Oksana Masters is published by Simon & Schuster
The NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331.
