After finally winning a first Paralympic gold medal in Pyeongchang this week the USA’s Oksana Masters said: “I did not believe this would happen. I’ve been chasing this gold medal and this feeling for such a long time.”
And on day eight of the Games she added a second gold - winning the women’s 5km sitting in the biathlon. The 28-year-old suffered mixed fortunes before her victories, but is well accustomed to overcoming adversity. Masters was born in Ukraine with multiple birth defects believed to have been caused by radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. One leg was six inches shorter than the other. Bones that bear the weight of the body were missing from her legs. She had webbed fingers and toes, no thumbs and only one kidney.
She was abandoned by her parents and grew up in orphanages, recalling that one of the worst things about the experience was that “so many people would tell you: ‘We’re looking at you, we’re going to adopt you, we’re going to take you out,’ and then they’d never come back.”
Aged seven she was finally adopted by her mother, Gay Masters, and moved to the United States. Once she was there her legs were amputated to, Masters says, “give her a better quality of life”.
Her time in South Korea did not all go smoothly. She injured an elbow only three weeks out from the Games and then fell when competing in the middle-distance biathlon event, forcing her withdrawal. “I knew I wasn’t going to let [that] be my last race,” she said after winning the women’s 1.1km sprint sitting in the cross-country skiing, praising the medical staff who had helped her to get back on to the snow.
Masters’ five medals medals in Pyeongchang - two gold, two silver and one bronze - add to the three she has earned in previous Paralympics.
That feeling when your dream finally comes true, you realize miracles do happen and you’re bringing home #TeamUSA a 🥇 at the #paralympics #ParaNoridc #PyeongChang2018 pic.twitter.com/chTM7DPq07
— Oksana Masters (@OksanaMasters) March 14, 2018
She dedicated her win in Pyeongchang to her mother. “This is the most amazing medal of my career. I cannot wait to put it around my mum’s neck. I told her the first gold, it’s hers.”
Gay Masters has described her daughter as a “resilient rascal” who “rose above three orphanages, five surgeries and poverty”. Oksana says that as a child she was always “super active and super competitive”.
As well as skiing Masters has also competed in rowing, winning a bronze medal at the London Paralympics. She had taken it up when she was 13. “I found love with the sport, partially because I got to be competitive and try and be better than other people.”
She has also found love through sport. Masters is in a relationship with one of her US Paralympics team-mates, Aaron Pike. It is the fourth time Pike has appeared at the Games, having competed in the London and Rio Paralympics as well as at the Sochi Winter edition.
Masters explains that having a relationship with someone who is not an athlete can be difficult. “It’s hard to understand the athlete’s lifestyle. You literally eat, sleep, train. You go to training camps in the winter where there is no internet, you can’t make phone calls,” she told Elite Daily in December.
It also, as Pike observes, gives you moments to share that not many couples can boast of. “I don’t think too many people get to say that they’ve walked in together, representing their country at an Olympic opening ceremony. You look over, and there’s your significant other, standing right there experiencing the exact same thing.”
In the buildup to Pyeongchang, Masters outlined her philosophy in approaching sport and life: “I’m a person that, once I start something, I can’t just quit it.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of body you have, it’s the determination and the spirit that’s going to get you there. I want to prove that.”
