Oksana Masters: Everything you need to know about the Paralympic star
The Team USA athlete was born in the shadow of Chernobyl and has gone on to win four gold medals at the Summer and Winter Paralympic Games.
Oksana Masters is a multi-sport athlete who has won gold medals at both the Summer and Winter Paralympic Games.
The Team USA athlete won double gold in the para cross-country skiing at PyeongChang 2018 before turning her attention to para cycling at the 2020 Paralympic Games in Tokyo where she visited the top of the podium twice more.
To date Masters has won 10 medals across four Summer and Winter Paralympic Games.
Masters born in the shadow of Chernobyl
Oksana Alexandrovna Bondarchuk was born in Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine, roughly 400km from Chernobyl, scene of the nuclear disaster in 1986.
Masters was born three years later in May, 1989, with her birth mother's exposure to radiation from the accident believed to have been a factor in her impairment.
She says on her website oksanamastersusa.com: "I was born an otherwise healthy baby, but had significant birth defects to my limbs and a few of my organs.
"I was born with six toes on each foot, five webbed fingers on each hand and no thumbs.
"My left leg was six inches shorter than my right one and both of my legs were missing weight-bearing bones.
"Last but not least, my knee floated in my C-shaped left leg. The medical term for one of the diagnosis is Tibia Hemimilla."
Oksana Masters: From Ukraine to the USA
Masters was given up for adoption and after living in three orphanages, she was adopted aged seven by Gay Masters, who took her to live in Buffalo, New York.
She had her left leg amputated when she was nine and the right leg at 14 and she has also had multiple reconstructive surgeries to both of her hands.
They moved to Louisville, Kentucky when she was 13, the same year she became interested in rowing and Masters started competing in adaptive rowing.
Success came her way including a world record at the 2010 Crash-B Sprints, the world indoor rowing championships.
Come 2012 and the Paralympic Games in London and Masters won bronze in the trunk and arm double sculls with partner Rob Jones, a former US marine who was injured when an IED exploded during a tour of Afghanistan.
Masters was forced to retire from rowing because of a back injury and switched her attention to nordic skiing a year later in Breckenridge, Colorado.
She told paralympics.org: "Cross-country skiing was an accident. I love winter, I love snow, I lived in Buffalo, I am from Ukraine where it gets cold in winter, so it is in my blood.
"A cross-country skiing coach heard that I wanted to try it and gave me that opportunity. A few weeks later I got to go out on the snow and try it, and I fell in love with it."
Masters goes from skiing novice to double Paralympic champion
In 2013, she was named to the US Paralympics Nordic Skiing Development Team and after a successful World Cup season, Masters was selected to Team USA for Sochi 2014.
She went on to beat the likes of Andrea Eskau of Germany and Norway’s Mariann Marthinsen - world ranked number one and two respectively - to claim silver in the para cross-country skiing 12km sitting and bronze in the 5km sitting.
To round off a whirlwind couple of seasons, Masters competed at the 2015 World Championships, where she won a silver and bronze medal in cross-country events.
Her 2018 Paralympic dreams were almost dashed when she dislocated her elbow a week before the Games were due to start.
However, she recovered just in time to compete and despite feeling constant pain, Masters won double gold in the women’s cross-country middle distance and sprint sitting.
She followed that up with silver in the biathlon sprint and long distance, and bronze in the cross-country long distance.
Juggling multiple sports
Masters had begun cycling in 2014 to relieve back strain from competitive rowing and the same year won bronze at the UCI Para-cycling worlds as well as claiming two third-place finishes at the World Cup.
Two years later she finished fourth in the road race at Rio 2016.
She had to wait an extra year for her next tilt at Paralympic cycling because of the one-year delay to the Games due to Covid-19.
In Tokyo, she won gold in the road race and the road race time trial.
Six months later, she will once more return to the snow at the Winter Paralympic Games in Beijing, China and the challenge of training for and competing in different sports.
She told Team USA: "I think what mentally drives me is I wasn’t satisfied with how I left the sport of rowing.
“It wasn’t my choice to walk away from it. My body failed me at that sport. I wasn’t able to maintain a quality of life to pursue that sport more.”
Reaching your goals - with a coffee in your hand
When not training or competing, Masters describes herself as "a coffee drinker, animal lover, and world traveler with a passion for sports. I truly believe that if we dream, we can achieve... Especially when there's a good cup of coffee in your hand."
She struggled with self-confidence as a child and believes children with an impairment need more role models.
"It's the end of the world if you're having a bad hair day or you have a pimple on your face for school picture day, let alone if you have prosthetic legs and hands that are hard to cover up " she told aralympics.org.
"Then society has put this label on you, even though you don't see yourself as 'disabled'."