Courtesy of CBG Photo
Oksana Masters had to lose her legs to become a world-class competitor. “If I hadn’t been an amputee, I would have never been an athlete,” she says.
Exposed to radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster while in the womb, Masters was born in 1989 with a condition called tibial hemimelia. Her left leg was six inches shorter than her right, and both limbs were missing weight-bearing bones. She had five webbed fingers on each hand and no thumbs.
Masters spent her first seven-and-a-half years in orphanages in Ukraine before she was adopted by an American college professor, Gay Masters.