Oksana Masters: ‘Without sport, I would not have had that healthy way to scream’

“I was the smallest one there and you learned not to show any emotion, whether you were sad or happy,” says Oksana Masters as she describes the Ukrainian orphanage where she suffered terrible abuse before being rescued and taken to America. Masters, who was born in the shadow of Chornobyl’s nuclear plant in 1989 and suffered multiple birth defects caused by radiation, is the most decorated US Paralympic athlete after excelling in four summer and winter sports, winning 17 medals.

But as she talks with wrenching emotion and extraordinary delicacy, Masters is deep inside the dark place where, as a damaged little girl whose birth parents had given her up, there was terror and pain. “I was always afraid of what would happen if I cried,” she says, “because nothing good happened in that orphanage if I cried. So you learn to laugh when, in those hard moments, you just want to cry.”

Masters and I have been talking intently, but surprisingly easily, for almost an hour. It helps I’ve read her riveting book, The Hard Parts, which explains how she was born with one kidney, a partial stomach, six toes on each foot, webbed fingers, no right biceps and no thumbs. Her left leg was six inches shorter than her right, without a tibia in either. After Gay Masters, an American academic, adopted her, Oksana had to endure a double amputation in the US. She suffered from acute PTSD and struggled to adapt as a disabled Ukrainian refugee in suburban America, but, somehow, sport became her salvation.

The 33-year-old admits she is still haunted because the orphanage was, in her words, “an underage brothel”. Between the ages of five and seven she was taken to “the room upstairs” and subjected to sexual abuse that scarred her badly.

“I was taken