The moment the national anthem ended at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, Oksana Masters started thinking about her next race. She was still on the podium, having just won a gold medal in cycling—her second from the 2020 Paralympics and fourth overall. With those wins, she was only the fourth U.S. woman and sixth American to have gold medals from both the Summer and Winter Paralympic Games. And, in six months, she’d have a chance to add to her collection in the cross-country skiing and biathlon events at Beijing’s 2022 Winter Paralympics. (Biathlon combines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting.)
“That transition is not smooth, not cute, and not pretty,” Masters tells SELF. “You’re, in theory, as fit as you can be for the summer sport, and then you go into your winter season sport. It’s as if you never worked out in your entire life.” And while the Summer and Winter Games are normally spaced two years apart, a pandemic-induced delay of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics drastically shortened her preparation timeline. So, Masters took a day off to soak in her wins. Then, she got back to training.
This work ethic has earned Masters 10 Paralympic medals across four sports (rowing, cycling, skiing, and biathlon). Even by Masters’s standards, the fact that she made it to the starting line of this gold-medal-winning race, let alone the podium, was shocking; 100 days before the Tokyo Games began, she was in surgery for the removal of multiple lymph nodes and a tumor on her femur. In her hospital room, she asked her mom for some resistance bands—anything to get just a little sweat going. So close to the Paralympic trials, she was on borrowed time, turning every second she could into a chance to get her strength back. “I’m not going to lie, a lot of tears went into it,” she says.
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By the time the qualifiers rolled around a few weeks later, Masters had only been back in her handcycle for two or three days. “I had to cut out parts of my bike to get into it because I still had the incision and [bandaging],” says Masters, 32. If she finished the race, she’d be guaranteed a spot on Team USA in Tokyo.
Competing with intense pain, she crashed. She didn’t finish the race. But that night, Masters got a call—based on her performance at the World Cup in May, she was in. “After that massive roller coaster of emotions was when I heard I was going to Tokyo,” she says.
So many of Masters’s stories go like this: extreme lows followed by extreme highs. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Gemini,” she says, laughing. But she’s adamant that her comebacks from those lows don’t make her superhuman. Masters’s forthcoming memoir, The Hard Parts—which covers her childhood growing up in the shadow of Chernobyl, the abuse she suffered in orphanages in Ukraine, her adoption, her double leg amputation, and her rise to total athletic dominance—is very decidedly not meant to be the inspiration porn of which she’s grown weary. “My goal with this memoir isn’t for someone to have a feel-good read, where they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s incredible what she did,’” she says.
Source: SELF
