She laughs out loud as she savors her success: “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it!” At the finish line, Oksana Masters exults as she catches her breath. Around her handbike, a tricycle powered by the strength of the arms, people jostle to congratulate her. There are journalists, members of Team USA and “the most important person in the world”her adoptive mother. A day after winning the time trial, the American won the road race of the Paralympic Games, Thursday, September 5, an event of approximately 57 kilometers around Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis).
On a road made very slippery by the showers that fell in the morning, the cyclist traced her trajectory and kept her balance, just like her life. Oksana Masters now has 19 Paralympic medals, including 9 gold, in four different disciplines. At 35, the American, celebrated during the opening ceremony, honors her status as a sports legend. Her destiny resembles a Hollywood script.
Oksana Alexandrovna Bondarchuk was born in Khmelnytskyi, a Ukrainian town about 400 kilometers from Chernobyl. In 1989, three years after the nuclear disaster, she was born with several congenital malformations, probably linked to radiation. Her legs, without a tibia, are not the same length, and her feet have six toes. As for her webbed hands, they do not have thumbs.
Abandoned in front of an orphanage, the future cyclist was tossed between different establishments. In the last one, which she attended from 1994 to 1996, she was raped at the age of 5.
Sport will be his salvation
In the United States, a professor dreams at the same time of adopting a child. “I was a single mother and at 30 I realized I wanted a baby, Gay Masters relates in the documentary Body and souldirected by Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai. I was lucky enough to meet a person who sent me a black and white photo of Oksana… I looked into her eyes and said to myself: “That’s my daughter!” I wasn’t afraid of his sticky fingers. »
Oksana was 8 years old when she arrived in Buffalo, New York. A month and a half later, a doctor explained to Gay Masters that her daughter’s legs had to be amputated because her legs were becoming increasingly painful and less and less able to support her weight. At 9, her left leg was cut off at the thigh. The right followed four years later. The athlete remembers: “I was overcome with so much rage and anger.”
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