She laughed out loud as she savored her success: “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it!” At the finish line, Oksana Masters rejoices as she catches her breath. Around her handbike, a tricycle powered by the strength of her arms, people jostle to congratulate her. Present are journalists, members of Team USA and “the most important person in the world”his adoptive mother. One day after winning the time trial, the American won the Paralympic Games road race on Thursday 5 September, a race of approximately 57 kilometres around Clichy-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis).
On a road made very slippery by the morning showers, the cyclist plotted her course and kept her balance, just like her life. Oksana Masters now has 19 Paralympic medals, including 9 gold, in four different disciplines. At 35 years old, the American, celebrated during the opening ceremony, lives up to her status as a sporting legend. Her destiny resembles a Hollywood set.
Oksana Alexandrovna Bondarchuk was born in Khmelnytskyi, a Ukrainian town located about 400 kilometers from Chernobyl. In 1989, three years after the nuclear disaster, she was born with several congenital malformations, probably related to radiation. Her legs, lacking a tibia, are not all 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 is thrown between different establishments. In the last one, which she attended from 1994 to 1996, she was raped when she was 5 years old.
Sport will be your salvation
In the United States, a teacher was dreaming at the same time of adopting a child. “I was a single mother and at 30 I realized that I wanted a baby, Gay Masters recounts in the documentary At a lossdirected 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!” He wasn’t afraid of his trapped 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 his daughter had to be amputated because her legs were becoming more and more painful and less able to support her weight. At age 9, her left leg was cut off at the thigh. The right leg followed four years later. The athlete recalls: “I was overwhelmed by so much rage and anger.”
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