Back At Home With The Nordic Community, Oksana Masters Thrived In Return From Injury This Season

When the Para Nordic skiing season wrapped up this spring, Oksana Masters received an unexpected invitation. The team from Ukraine, where Masters was born, invited her to join its end-of-year dinner.

“I just cannot believe it, because they literally see me as one of them,” said Masters, who lived in three Ukrainian orphanages before being adopted by an American mother at age 7. “I don’t speak Ukrainian anymore — my goal is to — so communication was fun. But this is something that is very unique is how much of a community the Paralympics (are).”

Masters, the most decorated U.S. Winter Paralympian of all time, knows better than most. She’s now won 17 Paralympic medals across Nordic skiing, cycling and rowing, and in a few months she’ll try to add some more as a cyclist at the Paralympic Games Paris 2024.

The 34-year-old is currently working through the seasonal transition to cycling. Earlier this month she won both races in her WH5 handcycling classification at a world cup event in Ostend, Belgium, and followed that with a gold and bronze at the world cup stop in Maniago, Italy.

Masters’ hot start to the cycling season is building off the momentum of the winter, where the native of Louisville, Kentucky, returned to her beloved Nordic community and enjoyed a resurgent season on her sit ski.

In 2022-23, coming off a strong performance at the Paralympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, Masters suffered an injury to her left hand that ultimately required surgery. As a result, she missed the entire season.

“I had to have three surgeries to do the whole reconstructive,” she said.

Ahead of the 2023-24 campaign, Masters said she was approaching the season as a way of “celebrating and being in the moment” with the U.S. team.

It ended up being quite productive, too.

In January, she won all three races she competed in at the U.S. Cross Country Ski Championships in Midway, Utah. Then she won eight medals — four of them gold — across a pair of world cup stops in Italy. Her season wrapped up in March at the IBU Para Biathlon World Championships in Prince George, British Columbia.

There, Masters won gold in the sprint and team sprint events, while adding a silver in the 12.5-kilometer race and a bronze in the sprint pursuit.

“The Nordic season recently went unexpectedly better than I imagined,” Masters said, noting she won every cross-country skiing race she entered. “I came back and had a new rifle. I had a few months to relearn how to hold the pole, how to ski again. And then I was able to win (at) the world championships.”

Of Masters’ three sports, she said she’s loved the experience in each, but the community in Nordic stands out.

She began skiing shortly after making her Paralympic debut as a rower in 2012 in London, and over three Paralympic Winter Games she’s won 14 of her medals on snow. Along the way, Masters traded rowing for cycling and made her Paralympic debut in that sport in 2016. She won a pair of cycling gold medals in 2021, to go with her rowing bronze medal from 2012.

Each sport’s difference extends beyond the field of play.

“Oh my gosh, the communities are wildly different from all the sports,” Masters said.

With rowing, the Para and able-bodied athletes typically travel together to international competitions, which led to a sense of “unity” among all the athletes, Masters said. Cycling has a different dynamic in that there are so many classifications — Masters is one of a select few female handcyclists on the current national team, she said, and the only “kneeler” — and the athletes not only need to become experts in their own equipment and races, but they also are judged against teammates from other classifications to determine who qualifies for major events.

“The cycling community has honestly been the hardest one for me to transition into because the culture of cycling is very different from rowing, and biathlon and cross-country skiing,” she said.

Nordic skiing, on the other hand, proved to be a natural home for Masters pretty much from the start.

“That community felt like more of a family,” she said.

On the U.S. team, Masters has teamed up with Kendall Gretsch to create a potent Team USA sit skiing duo — the pair combined for 10 medals at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing — while Masters also has literal family on the team in fiancé Aaron Pike, a three-time Winter Paralympian who is also a sit skier (he’ll also compete in his fourth Summer Paralympics this year in track and field).

And then there’s Ukraine, a power in Para Nordic and, in some ways, Masters’ adopted team. When she’s racing across the snow, the Ukrainian delegation cheers her on and calls out her splits just like the Americans do.

“I'm so lucky because I have Team USA, but I have Team Ukraine supporting me and the Ukrainian Paralympic Committee is constantly supporting and liking, commenting, sending me messages and congratulations,” Masters said.

The shared solidarity with her birth country has taken on even greater meaning in recent years. Russia invaded Ukraine just days before the 2022 Paralympics began, and after the Games Masters donated prize money to an organization supporting children in her birth country. If she medals in Paris, she plans to do that again.

“I left Ukraine with no voice, and I’m going into Paris as an athlete for Team USA, representing Ukraine, and I have a voice,” she said, “and we’re going to help make sure it’s heard to help people in Ukraine.”

Chrös McDougall has covered the Olympic and Paralympic Movement for TeamUSA.com since 2009 on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc. He is based in Minneapolis-St. Paul.