GROWING UP IN THE SHADOW OF CHERNOBYL

Three women born near the Ukrainian nuclear disaster zone share how it shaped their lives and the fear that never goes away

- SIMON USBORNE

WHEN Oksana Masters is having a bad day, h er moth er brings her sunflowers. Their petals contain layers of meaning for Oksana, an athlete who was born in Ukraine where the flowers are regarded as a symbol of peace and pride.

A vase of them overflows behind her as she speaks, via video call, from her home in Champaign, Illinois, a city south of Chicago.

“They make me so happy,” she explains. “In the middle of chaos, they still point to the sun, to the positive, to the light. And that’s what I need sometimes.”

Oksana is 34. She was born in 1989 with severe disabilities, including missing shinbones and thumbs, which are thought to have been caused by her mother’s exposure to radiation after the Chernobyl disaster three years earlier.

Her birth parents immediately handed her to the state, unwittingly dooming her to an early childhood of extreme cruelty and abuse.

At the last of three orphanages Oksana was raped repeatedly, beaten and cut for perceived transgressions, her medical needs were ignored and she became dangerously malnourished.

Gay Masters, an American academic, adopted her when she was seven. Oksana arrived in the United States so underweight that doctors diagnosed her with FTT – the medical term “failure to thrive”.

Twenty-six years later, after numerous operations, including the amputation of both legs, she has become one of the world’s most successful athletes.

It’s a story she tells in her new memoir, The Hard Parts, an account of an improbable journey to the pinnacle of four Paralympic sports: rowing, cross-country skiing, cycling and biathlon.