Standing on a podium by Russia’s Black Sea coast, Oksana Masters felt a surge of pride as the anthems played. It wasn’t her first Paralympic medal, but this one was extra special.
She had just won cross country skiing silver at the Sochi Winter Games of 2014. As she held her prize, the flag of neighbouring Ukraine was raised for the winner, Lyudmila Pavlenko. Masters was herself born in Ukraine in 1989, three years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. She was born with severe physical defects caused by exposure to radiation.
In Sochi she was competing for the USA, the country where she grew up, an adopted child raised by a single mother. Returning to somewhere so close to the country of her birth had been a big motivation for qualifying to compete in Russia.
“It was kind of coming full circle,” she says. “It wasn’t my gold-medal moment, but it sure felt like it.”
Oksana’s moment would come. Four years later, two of the five medals she won at Pyeongchang 2018 were gold. And this year she will be competing on the Paralympic stage for a fifth time – at the summer Games of Tokyo 2020.
It will be another chapter in the remarkable life story Oksana shared with BBC World Service. A story that begins in the Ukrainian orphanage that was her home until the age of seven.
I have good and bad memories. I remember fields of sunflowers. I don’t know if it was because I was tiny but they seemed massive. There was also a plum tree and we didn’t get a lot of food so we would steal plums and pick seeds off the sunflowers.
Whenever I see sunflowers now, it’s a good memory because what you read about eastern European orphanages is pretty accurate. I definitely remember the really, really sharp pain in your stomach from being hungry all the time.
Right from birth I was put up for adoption. I was born with six toes, I was missing the main weight-bearing bones in my legs, my knees were floating – they weren’t supported by anything. My hands were webbed; I was born with five fingers, without thumbs. I don’t have a right bicep, I’m missing some organs. I have one kidney and don’t have any enamel on my teeth. When I came to America I found out that the only thing that can strip enamel before birth is radiation.
They linked it to Chernobyl because I was really not that far from there, and the fact that radiation levels continued to rise years after the explosion. It definitely lingered on years later to when I was born. There was also a power plant in the village of the orphanage that would go off frequently. Whenever the radiation was high there was this one cop who would drive round and tell us to board up the windows and doors, not to go out.
I’ve just finished watching the TV series Chernobyl. I knew parts of it. I knew that things went on behind the scenes to cover up the magnitude of it. It’s sad that it took away so many lives and homes. That part of the country will never be the same.
I don’t want to say I was a product of it but, out of something horrific, it’s about how you can see the potential and possibilities – like becoming an athlete – instead of dwelling on it.
Masters has grown up to compete at four Paralympics – with Tokyo 2020 set to be her fifth
When I was five I was called into the director’s office and they said: “We have a picture to show you – this is going to be your new mum.” When I saw her face, she had the warmest eyes and warmest smile.
She’d never met me. She made her adoption choice on a picture of me. Every day until she came to the orphanage I would ask the director: “Can I look at my mum?”
Sometimes, if I wasn’t good – because I was a troublemaker – then the director would use it against me and be like: “You can’t look at the picture today. You’re a bad girl. This is why she’s not coming, because you don’t listen.” Because the process took two years I started to believe that. But her picture kept me going.
She fought for me for two years, and then she came and saw the situation I was living in. When she walked in the hallway there were people chipping away at the ice on the floor because the radiators had frozen.
