Crew: Loudoun Valley Grad Rob Jones Takes Bronze at London Paralympics in Mixed Double Sculls

Special to Viva Loudoun via Loudoun County Public Schools
(Sept. 6, 2012) - Loudoun Valley High School graduate Rob Jones and his rowing partner, Oksana Masters, won a bronze medal in mixed double sculls Sunday at the Paralympics in London, edging Britain’s Nicholas Beighton and Samantha Scowen by 0.21 seconds.


It’s the first U.S. medal ever in the event.

World-record holders Xiaxian Lou and Tianming Fei of China won the 1,000-meter race in 3:57.63, well ahead of France’s Perle Bouge and Stephane Tardieu (4:03.06).

Masters and Jones finished in 4:05.56. Masters, 23, and Jones, 27, had qualified for the Paralympics by winning the World Cup in Serbia in May.

Jones, then a Marine corporal, lost his left leg at the knee and his right leg a little above the knee on July 22, 2010, in Afghanistan. He was deployed as a team leader with a combat engineering unit when he was severely wounded by an improvised explosive device (IED). Less than four months later, on Nov. 11, 2010, Jones returned to Loudoun Valley to speak at the school’s Veterans Day program.

Masters was adopted from an orphanage in the Ukraine at the age of 7. Her home village had been close to a nuclear power plant and she is a bilateral above-knee amputee as the result of in utero radiation poisoning.