Sports helped Oksana Masters heal from trauma, find love and win gold

Masters, 35, won the gold medal in the H5 road race Thursday and another goal medal for Team USA in the H4-5 individual handcycling time trial in Paris on Wednesday.

To outsiders, her life and career may look like a fairy tale. But for Masters, of Champaign, Ill., her rise into Paralympic superstardom represents an opportunity to use her platform to talk about bigger issues.

In recent years, she has opened up about the trauma and adversity she has experienced, hoping to spark conversations about issues such as mental health, equity for Paralympians, orphanage systems and normalizing disability.

“When I got into sport, it was my therapy, it was my way of processing everything,” she said. “I think it is what makes me, in some ways, the athlete that I am.”

“You cannot just celebrate the pretty side,” Masters said.

Healing from a traumatic past

Masters struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, stemming from her childhood in an Ukrainian orphanage. She said she still finds certain sounds and scents triggering. “I have so much that I’m still trying to process,” she said. Sports, Masters said, has given her “so many memories that outshine and outweigh” the past.

Masters was born in Ukraine in 1989 with multiple disabilities, linked to radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Among other things, she had six toes on each foot, five webbed fingers on each hand with no thumbs and uneven legs that were missing weight-bearing bones. She was also missing part of her stomach, her right biceps and one kidney.

Put up for adoption, she spent her early childhood in orphanages. In her 2023 book, “The Hard Parts (A Memoir of Courage and Triumph),” she describes only a “small sliver” of what she experienced in the orphanage system, including being beaten and raped.

She recalls her tooth being pulled out with pliers and no anesthesia and being frequently cold, afraid and “always hungry.” Masters also writes about hiding under a table and hearing her best friend, Laney, being beaten to death for trying to steal bread.

Learning to have a childhood

In early 1997, Masters, then 7, was adopted by an American woman. “I just saw something in her eyes — that there was a spark there,” Gay Masters said about a photo of Oksana, immediately feeling that she was her daughter.

Oksana Masters now had a regular childhood and toys of her own, but she struggled. She hoarded sugar cubes, had trouble sleeping and named all her dolls Laney, she writes in her memoir.

She said that though she knew she couldn’t walk the same way as other children, she never realized she had a disability until she moved to the United States. She had several surgeries for her disabilities — by the time she was 14, she had both legs amputated.

Gay Masters said her daughter hid her depression and trauma by being goofy and staying extremely active. But at night, she cried frequently.

“If she was still, then those memories flooded her,” Masters’s mother said. “I always knew there was something she couldn’t tell me about, but I couldn’t push it.”

To help her daughter cope and keep her active, she had her participate in sports such as ice skating, swimming, volleyball and baseball. When Oksana was a teenager, her mom encouraged her to try adaptive rowing, a sport she instantly fell in love with — when she was rowing, she felt in control, safe and calm.

Her passion for the sport led her to the Paralympics. Masters went on to win a bronze medal in a rowing event during the 2012 Paralympic Games but had to give up rowing after she had a back injury in 2013.

Finding love on the slopes

Masters began skiing after the 2012 Paralympics, with an eye toward competing in the sport, and it led her to Pike, whom she met at a cross-country skiing race event in Utah.

Pike, 38, has a spinal cord injury from a hunting accident that left him with limited leg mobility, and he uses a wheelchair. He has competed in skiing, biathlon and wheelchair racing.

Masters said she first noticed Pike in a communal kitchen, drinking coffee from a French press, which immediately drew her in because she is a huge fan of coffee. Chatting with him, she said, she instantly felt at ease.

“I don’t trust easily at all,” she said. “It felt like I knew him my whole entire life. I felt like I could just fully be myself and relax and genuinely be my random, goofy self.”

But it wasn’t until the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, that Masters realized how much she liked him. They flew from Sochi to Munich together, then had to take separate flights home. Masters realized she didn’t know when she would see him again and grew sad.

“I could not let this be a thing that happened during the winter and let him be the one who got away,” she said.

They started traveling to meet each other, and their relationship “naturally bloomed” as they slowly became a couple, Masters said. They went on camping trips, shared many cups of coffee and sent each other letters and care packages.

A romantic proposal

In August 2022, they went to the Grand Tetons, a place that was significant to her mother, who had worked there during summers in college and loved it.

Pike proposed with Masters’s grandmother’s ring while they were riding on a gondola up a mountain. “He wanted me to have a connection to Tetons just like my mom,” Masters said.

She hopes to get married around the mountains when their schedules allow it.

They both have intense training schedules. In the lead-up to Paris, Masters did two solo bike rides each day — which could sometimes stretch to four and a half hours. Roughly twice a week, she also strength-trained at a gym, where Pike helped coach her. At the end of their days, they usually recovered by doing cold plunges and using a sauna.

“It’s really challenging because even though we live together, our off days do not always line up,” Masters said.

Balancing each other

Masters said Pike has helped her build confidence, as a person and an athlete. Whereas Masters likes to feel in control and said she freaks out when she goes too fast, she aspires to be more like Pike, calling him “fearless.”

“I know my top speed can be more,” she said. “It’s just about allowing myself to trust myself and be fearless enough.”

To help her prepare for Paris, she said, Pike took her on routes with downhills and sharp turns — two things she was anxious about for her course in Paris — and talked her through each one.

Masters has different strengths — such as her meticulous attention to detail — and has given Pike feedback on his form. “I can pick out something and notice something within two seconds,” she said.

Outside sports, they are “the perfect mix,” with opposite personalities, Masters said. While she is more intense, often on edge and constantly planning for the future, Pike is laid back and makes a lot of jokes, she said.

Chasing perfection

When Masters is racing on her bike, she feels free. “It literally feels like I’m flying, and in some ways, I am,” she explained.

The Paris race route required more technical mastery of the sport because the roads are narrow with steep descents and tight corners, different from the flat, straight country roads where Masters does much of her training.

Her goal for Paris was to have what she calls “a perfect race,” where she would not change a single thing to improve. Masters calls herself a perfectionist and said the first thing she thinks about after a race is usually what she did wrong.

She said her perfectionism is partially because of her childhood in Ukraine, where “if something was good, it was just a matter of time before you lost it or something bad happened.” As an athlete, she said, her mentality is always to look forward and think about the next race — and not get too comfortable with her past accomplishments.

Part of her drive to succeed also comes from her debut 2016 Paralympic handcycling performance in Brazil.

Masters fell just shy of the podium in Rio de Janeiro, placing fourth in the road race. Afterward, the cycling team was completely silent. “I could feel the disappointment. I was told that I didn’t want it bad enough because I should have medaled,” she recalled. She said that she has never forgotten the feeling of letting others down and that it serves to motivate her.

At the next Summer Games, Masters took gold in the road race and time trial for cycling, becoming one of just a few U.S. athletes who have won in both the Summer and Winter Paralympics. This year, she aimed to prove that those gold medals weren’t a fluke, she said.

Masters competed under the H5 classification, which is for athletes with the least amount of impairment, who have trunk and arm function.

Masters’s Paralympic transformation

Carlos Moleda, manager for the Challenged Athletes Foundation’s Women’s Handcycling Team, which Masters is a part of, said her confidence has “skyrocketed” in recent years.

“She could pick any sport, and she would soar,” Moleda said. “She would be really, really good at it because she is just a natural athlete.”

At the beginning of her Paralympic career, Masters said, she was opening credit cards to buy equipment and running out of money to support herself — sometimes sleeping in her car when she didn’t have money for a hotel.

Then, before the 2018 Paralympics, she nabbed major sponsorships — from companies such as Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Nike and Visa — and in an instant, her life seemed to change, she said.

Thanks to her sponsorships, she is now able to buy better, customized equipment. The base price for a handcycle can be $17,000, she said, which doesn’t include customization, tires or wheels. “I don’t think people realize the staggering cost of it all,” she said.

Along with her newfound financial security, Masters has become a popular, well-known figure, turning her into a role model and mentor for many young female athletes, Moleda said.

“Oksana is the picture of what an athlete should be,” he said. “And that confidence is contagious.”

He added that Masters has helped other women with disabilities feel more confident and beautiful with their own body image.

Her biggest dream

Masters said she still has one unfulfilled dream — to be a mom.

“I know I have the same calling that my mom did,” she said. “And now it’s calling and tugging at my heart more and more.”

This year’s Games were the first to have a nursery at the Olympic and Paralympic Village, intended to help athletes balance parenthood with sports. Seeing changes like that has helped Masters feel like it is possible to be both an athlete and a mom, she said.

“I love racing so much, but there’s nothing like a true legacy than raising kids to be the best humans and leave their own mark,” she said.