How Oksana Masters learned to love and accept herself
Masters’ story has been told many times by now, so much so she is a well-known face among U.S. Paralympic sports fans. She grew up in Ukraine with inherited impairments caused by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and was left at an orphanage.
“There’s really three times I really say my life was saved in my lifetime,” Masters, who was adopted and brought to the United States at eight years old, said on the podcast. “My mom saved my life, literally, from Ukraine because they told her I wasn’t supposed to live past 10 years old.
“And then she saved it again by introducing the world of sports to me. And sport was really that third thing that really saved my life, because that’s really where I started to learn the journey and on that path of loving myself, accepting myself.”
But sport wasn’t something Masters ever saw herself doing. “I had no idea I could be an athlete. I had no idea I could be a Paralympian because that was just not visible to me or ever talked about.
“And also I’m missing my legs. How on earth can I be an athlete?”
It so happens that Masters’ mother encouraged her to take up Para rowing at 13, shortly after she had her second leg amputation (she lost her first leg at nine years old).
“I have never felt more at home to finally have that place where I belong than on that water. That was my step one to really healing and learning myself,” Masters recalled.
“I had to go back and fix those wounds and work on these wounds mentally, the things that scars that people cannot see, before the physical scars, my legs, my accessories that people see very obviously.
“Sport was therapy. And I learned to love it that way first versus winning and setting goals and trying to be the best in the world and trying to represent the USA, because I never saw myself as that. I didn’t know it was possible to do that, especially for me.”
And yet, she has done exactly that, winning seven gold, seven silver, and three bronze medals at her six Paralympic Games in thee different sports.
