I did not know any of the members of the U.S. figure skating family who died in Wednesday’s tragic accident involving an American Airlines plane and a military helicopter.
Yet I am among those who deeply mourn for them.
Figure skating in the United States is an extended family that includes journalists, despite our best (and necessary) efforts to keep the appropriate relative distance from people we write about so that we can tell the stories that need to be told.
In none of the other sports I covered on a regular basis have I found athletes, coaches and officials as accessible, open-hearted and helpful as in figure skating.
It is, as I wrote several years ago, a big reason I became enchanted by figure skating at the 1980 Olympics and have remained enchanted since. Insiders welcomed outsiders and did not roll their eyes at dumb questions.
When I have needed a comment for a story, the sport’s great champions and leading coaches always have been willing to talk. You feel a kinship with people who are so relentlessly giving.
And then there is temporal and physical proximity.
The plane that went down, killing all aboard, was coming from Wichita, Kan., where the U.S. Figure Skating Championships had ended Sunday.
I was also in Wichita, covering my 38th national championships, writing about the sport’s current elite, catching up with dozens of former competitors I have written about and come to know in my 45 years covering the sport.
The skaters who died Wednesday were those trying to join the future elite. They were among 150 athletes from the sport’s lower competitive levels who had been invited to a national development camp that took place Monday and Tuesday.
They undoubtedly felt honored and excited to be selected. It was a significant way station on a track that hopefully would take them to nationals — and perhaps beyond.
They also had been given a taste of nationals as spectators. I saw and heard them cheering relentlessly for the senior- and junior-level skaters whose achievements they hoped to emulate.
They are mourned by those like me who had not met them, not just because they were young and talented. They are mourned because to anyone associated with the sport, they are part of the family.
U.S. figure skating now has lost some of its next generation, as well as coaches and officials and parents who were guiding them.
Those dead include as many as 11 skaters, four coaches, 12 parents and two siblings, according to a person familiar with the situation. “It’s hard to comprehend,” the person said.
This is, unimaginably, the second time similar heartbreak has happened to U.S. figure skating, as 1960 Olympic champion Carol Heiss Jenkins noted in a message to me that read, “Tragic and incomprehensible and thoughts of 1961.”
On Feb. 15, 1961, the entire 18-member U.S. figure skating team headed for the 1961 World Championships in Prague died when its plane from New York plunged into a Belgian field while trying to land at its scheduled stop in Brussels. Sixteen people accompanying the skaters — coaches, family members, officials — and 38 other passengers and crew also died.
What is known about the collision between a passenger jet and Army helicopter near DC
The figure skating family in the U.S. still grieves that loss painfully. Many would not talk about it for years. Yet within months of the crash, a memorial fund was established that would turn part of the 1961 team’s legacy into financial help for many of its successors, and generations of excellence followed.
There is a stunningly sad link between the 1961 crash and Wednesday’s. In 1961, five of the dead were skaters from the venerable Skating Club of Boston, as was the famed skater-turned-coach Maribel Vinson Owen. Her two daughters were among the athletes who died on the plane.
The Skating Club of Boston announced Thursday that it lost six members in this disaster: two skaters, the mothers of those skaters and Russian coaches Evgenia Shishkova and her husband, Vadim Naumov, the 1994 world pairs champions whose son, Maxim, finished fourth in men’s singles Sunday. Maxim Naumov had left Wichita earlier in the week.
The World Figure Skating Championships are to take place in Boston on March 26-30. U.S. skaters have a shot at gold medals in three of the sport’s four disciplines, which of course should have been something to anticipate without reservation and celebrate uproariously if it happens.
For the U.S. figure skating family, any such celebrations now will be bittersweet and muted.
Philip Hersh was the Tribune’s Olympic sports columnist for 30 years. He has covered figure skating at the last 12 Winter Olympics.