Paralympic Spirit

The path from orphanages to medals

It was not hard to find the family of Tatyana McFadden in the stands of Laura, the mountain ski center built above Sochi for the 2014 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Amid a sea of Russian flags (and a few Ukrainian ones thrown in for good measure) there was a woman waving a star spangled banner and a group of kids shaking a homemade poster that screamed, “Go Tatyana Go!”

About twenty years ago, Tatyana's mother Deborah visited a St. Petersburg orphanage. There she saw a little girl crawling about the playroom on her hands. She had no use of her legs due to spina bifida, and had no wheelchair. But the sparkle in her eyes stayed with Deborah, a US government worker in Russia on an aid mission.

Although doctors told Deborah that Tatyana's problems were so great that she would probably die, she eventually adopted Tatyana nonetheless, shepherded her through numerous operations, and enlisted her in sports to build her endurance and muscle tone.

This past March Tatyana returned to the country of her birth as an accomplished athlete. In fact, McFadden is one of the brightest stars of America's Paralympic movement. Already a Paralympic champion in the summer sport of wheelchair racing, and winner of a handful of the world's most notable marathons, McFadden was hungry for more. So she started skiing, qualified for the national Paralympic team, and, although she only had limited experience with snow, took a medal in Sochi's 1-kilometer sprint race.

Yet as McFadden sat in the sun in her US uniform, her hair tightly braided before the start, she was not the only orphan from Russia or the FSU whom an American family had gifted with a second chance in life. Racing alongside her was Oksana Masters, born in 1989 in Khmelnitsky, Ukraine, and adopted by Gay Masters. Oksana was born without weight-bearing bones in her legs – a congenital condition caused by radiation poisoning from the Chernobyl nuclear plant catastrophe.*

“She was a special needs child” by the time she was adopted at the age of seven and a half, Gay Masters said. Her legs had to be amputated. “Sport changed her a lot,” Gay said, sitting alongside the McFadden family and watching the two girls race.

In America, Oksana grew up to row at the Paralympic level and was named one of the “11 Hottest Paralympic Athletes” after posing nude for ESPN's Body Issue in 2012. She was the only Paralympic athlete to proudly show off her body – and her tattoos – posing on a jetty with her rowing oars. In Sochi, she eventually took two medals.

To complete the picture, Jessica Long, the US Paralympian swimmer adopted when she was about a year old from Siberia, was also in the stands. Born Tatyana Kirillova, Jessica also had to have her legs amputated because of a congenital bone condition. In Sochi, the radiant, blonde 22-year-old – one of the most accomplished athletes of her generation, was the on-camera talent with the NBC Olympic coverage team.

“I have seen Russian headlines that said Russia ‘lost two gold athletes' after the London Paralympics,” Deborah McFadden said. “Well, Russia did not want them!”

McFadden's and Long's success has evoked debates and navel-gazing in the Russian press, particularly after a law was passed in 2012 that banned adoption of Russian orphans by Americans. What will become of the Tatyanas of the current generation, those who will not get a second chance in the United States?

The Russian government argues that there are opportunities for such children in Russia too, and boosted financial aid to Russia's adoptive parents. But experts say that money is not a solution when there is insufficient institutional support for children requiring expensive medical care, when the orphanage system does not in fact encourage adoption (see Russian Life, Mar/Apr 2013). Russian media report that many of the children who were in the final stages of the adoption process when President Vladimir Putin signed the adoption ban into law are still languishing in their orphanages, that some of them have died.

Both Long and McFadden lobbied against the law, delivering a petition signed by nearly 140,000 people to the Russian embassy in the United States. They have received no response to the petition, Deborah McFadden said.

“She wants to be an example that other people with disabilities in Russia can be active,” Deborah said of her daughter. But Russian stonewalling on the issue was discouraging, particularly given Tatyana's personal history. “If she were not adopted,” Deborah continued, “she would have died.”

“We did the best we could, everything that we could,” Tatyana said of the petition. “I think being here, just personally, people can see my story and the impact that it has,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I live an absolutely wonderful life, it just happened that an American family adopted me. I love going back to Russia, being part of my culture, but my home is in America. I'm an American citizen, and I also have a bit of Russia in me.”

Unusual for most adopted children, Tatyana sought out and found her birth mother, Nina Polevikova, with the help of her former orphanage. She stayed with her in St. Petersburg on a previous visit and then invited her (and a small army of other blood relatives) to Sochi, to support her from the stands.

Nina and Deborah stood next to each other in the stands, cheering in Russian and English for their daughter. It was a “dream come true,” Tatyana said. “It was a long-term decision I made about a year ago, so it was really important to have my family here.”

“She paid to bring the family here, for all of them, with her race award money, instead of buying a car,” Deborah said proudly. “A lot of people don't want to know their birth mother, but here we are cheering side by side.”

The director of Tatyana's former orphanage also stood nearby. An outspoken critic of the adoption ban, Natalia Nikiforova recently co-authored a proposal to reform Russian orphanages by down-sizing them to encompass smaller groups of children of mixed ages and disabilities, with a bigger staff of teachers and caregivers who communicate and play with them, without being afraid to form personal relationships.

Orphanages that have adopted the experimental approach have had fewer cases of adoptive parents returning children, and a higher overall adoption rate. A tireless activist for closing down the old children's homes, where orphans cultivate no relationships with adults and are set on a path of lifetime isolation, Nikiforova has stated in countless interviews that one of the great tragedies of the adoption ban is that the children with the greatest health problems were often only adopted by American families.

But in Sochi, Nikiforova was not working. Standing at Laura in a winter jacket, she beamed, clapping and chanting: “Tatyana! Tatyana!”

“It means a lot that she is racing in Russia,” Nikiforova said. “She is a talented person, very strong willed, who took advantage of every opportunity, she realized her potential.”

“Deborah is a remarkable woman who played a huge role,” Nikiforova said of Tatyana's adoptive mother. “But a person is born with their character, that is the achievement of her biological mother.” RL

* On April 26, 1986, a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine melted down, spreading nuclear radiation throughout Europe, but particularly heavily in the Soviet republics of Byelorrussia and Ukraine.