Oksana Masters recalls first Paralympic medal in memoir excerpt

In “The Hard Parts: A Memoir of Courage and Triumph,” 17-time Paralympic medalist Oksana Masters tells her life story: born in Ukraine with a set of birth defects believed to be caused by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, she bounced between orphanages, abused, for seven years until being adopted by an American single mother and beginning an athletic career that led to her becoming the most decorated Winter Paralympian in U.S. history.

The memoir came out Tuesday and is available here.

In the below excerpt, Masters tells the story of winning her first Paralympic medal with Rob Jones in a mixed-gender rowing double sculls event at the 2012 London Games.

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We don’t go to the Opening Ceremonies. It would be a six-hour round-trip bus ride to get to the main village where they’re happening, and our race is early tomorrow morning, one of the first races of the Games. Twelve boats are competing for gold, starting tomorrow with two heats of six boats each. The top boats in each automatically head to the final race two days later. In the intervening day the others get one more chance, at the repechage, or runoff heat, to try for one of the four remaining spots in the final.

All of the rowers, just shy of a hundred athletes, have our own mini-celebration in our little satellite village. We dress in our country’s Opening Ceremonies outfits—ours are sort of like business suits, which I don’t love, but I’m still so excited to be wearing any iteration of a uniform that I don’t care—and gather in front of a big TV to watch.

As I watch all the countries entering the Olympic Stadium three hours away in London, upward of four thousand people experiencing exactly what I’m experiencing—pride, joy, nerves, even though mine are a little muted