"I knew it was going to be tough," Oksana Masters said after winning the individual sitting biathlon on Friday.

A few days earlier she had addressed the public via Instagram with these words: "I feel stubborn, helpless and guilty for being here." Finding the necessary motivation for the sporting competitions is difficult when her home country is at the same time suffer an invasion war.

At the Beijing Paralympic Games, Masters managed to sort out her emotions.

She won three medals in three competitions: before the gold in the individual competition, Masters had already won silver over the middle distance and gold over the sprint distance.

From the USA, for which Masters competes in international competitions, no athlete has been more successful than her.

But she also noticed that she doesn't want to keep her victories to herself.

“I want every start I make to mean something, more than just a result.

That's why I'm going to donate the proceeds from my prize money from the Paralympics to.” Her prize money totaling 97,500 US dollars (around 88,500 euros) will go to the Kyiv-based program “No Child Forgotten”, which supports children with disabilities in Ukraine.

"Disabilities from Birth"

Masters made it clear that even if her medals in the Nations Cup are attributed to the USA, she also competes for Ukraine.

In 1989 she was born in the city of Khmelnytskyi.

She would probably not have become the exceptional athlete she is today if the circumstances of her birth had been different.

Doctors have attributed her severe hemimelia in her legs, resulting in missing bones in her lower extremities, to high levels of radiation.

Khmelnytskyi is around 400 kilometers from Chernobyl, where the nuclear power plant exploded in 1986.

"I was born with so many disabilities that my biological parents thought life in an orphanage would be better for me." But there were neither good precautions against radioactivity nor regular food.

When little Oksana was taken in by her adoptive mother, Gay Masters, she was underweight.

In the USA she developed a love for all kinds of sports - in many of them she became a top athlete.

The last gold in Beijing was Masters' 15th Paralympic medal.

In Sochi in 2014, she won bronze for the first time in a five-kilometer race in cross-country skiing.

In 2018 in Pyeongchang, she won bronze and two gold medals in cross-country skiing, as well as two silver medals in parabiathlon.

Masters has also been one of the best at summer games for a long time.

In London in 2012, she finished third in para rowing before having to give up the sport due to a back injury.

Masters then switched to cycling, where she won two gold medals at the Summer Games in Tokyo a good six months ago.

In the same year she had a tumor removed from her thigh.

"My mother told me that my Ukrainian heart made me a fighter," said Oksana Masters in Beijing.

The question of the importance that an athlete's fights can have in a competition has arisen several times in recent weeks.

The Russian army's invasion of the Ukraine, where Masters' parents are believed to still be living today, soon led to an attack on the nuclear ruins in Chernobyl, where there have now been power cuts, so that there are fears of a renewed increase in radioactivity.

For Oksana Masters, this brings back memories of her childhood.

Before she traveled back to the USA from Beijing, she greeted her other homeland: "Today I'm prouder than ever that I'm Ukrainian."