sport news Oksana Masters survived Chernobyl radiation and rape, witnessed murder as an ... trends now
When she takes to the start line in Paris this summer, Team USA para-cyclist Oksana Masters can rest assured that she's already overcome challenges far more perilous than any bike race can throw at her.
Masters, a seven-time Paralympic champion and 17-time medalist across a range of sports in both the summer and winter Games, heads to the French capital with a backstory few other athletes can rival when it comes to trauma, survival and willpower.
From the very start of her life the odds were stacked against her in the most cruel and devastating of manners. Born Khmelnitsky, Ukraine, three years after the Chernobyl disaster, Oksana was forced to grow up with physical defects induced by radiation poisoning from the city's infamous nuclear reactor.
With webbed fingers on each hand, no thumbs, a left leg six inches shorter than her right, and both being deprived of weight-bearing bones, she was facing an uphill battle the moment she first laid eyes on the world. Such an uphill battle, in fact, that the girl from Khmelnitsky was given up for adoption by birth parents incapable of providing the care she so desperately needed.
Oksana Masters heads to Paris for the Paralympic Games knowing she has overcome far more perilous challenges
Masters, a seven-time Paralympic champion, will hope to add to her collection in France
The multi-sport athlete, who now competes in para-cycling, is a double amputee
Masters was born in Ukraine with physical defects three years on from the Chernobyl disaster
After witnessing horrific scenes in a Ukrainian orphanage, having been abandoned by her birth parents, she was adopted at the age of seven by American woman Gay Masters
At the age of seven she was adopted by Gay Masters, a single American speech therapist who brought her over to the US after an arduous two-year struggle.
Yet, before she was rescued by Masters, Oksana endured the kind of horror no child should ever have to experience in the orphanage; where she was beaten frequently, raped - sometimes more than once a day - and witnessed another orphan girl, her best friend Lainey, being murdered.
After escaping the hell of her traumatic childhood in Ukraine, by the age of 14 life had taken another wicked turn when she became a double-amputee, the result of both of her legs becoming too painful and incapable of supporting her weight.
Fast forward two decades and Masters, now 34, boasts a legacy as one of the most decorated Paralympians in US history. Over the past 10 years she has swept up 17 medals in cross-country skiing, biathlon, rowing and para-cycling - the latter of which she will compete in again at the Paris Games this summer.
And as she gears up for her latest crack at glory, Masters has learned not to let the pain of her childhood influence her emotions in a negative way.
'I was such an angry racer,' she says about her initial struggles in sport. 'I always raced so hard and just threw everything out there. That came from the childhood experience that I had.
'But what I'm learning through therapy is that it's not sustainable for me.'
In recent years Masters has turned to a sports therapist to help her resist associating the start line of races with trauma and anger. 'It's another workout I have to put in,' she adds.
Two decades after losing both of her legs, Masters stands tall as a Paralympic great
She heads to Paris in a clear space of mind after letting go of the anger of her childhood
Part of letting go of this fury, of this rage at what she has had to overcome in her life, the multi-sport Paralympian attributes to writing her book - 'The Hard Parts' - in which she documents her tumultuous upbringing. It has allowed
