The US’s most successful Paralympian, born in the shadow of Chornobyl, on her traumatic childhood, Ukrainian resilience and her plans for two more Games
“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.”
