I did not know any member of the US Figure Skating Family, who included an American airline aircraft and a military helicopter in Wednesday’s tragic accident.
Nevertheless, I am among those who mourn deeply for them.
In the United States, Figure Skating is an extended family that includes journalists, despite our best (and necessary) efforts to keep suitable relative distances from people who write so that we can tell stories that need to tell.
Any of other sports I have covered regularly have found athletes, coaches and officers as accessible, open heart and assistant as figure skating.
This is, as I wrote many years ago, a big reason I was enchanted by figure skating in the 1980 Olympics and has been enchanted since then. Inner sources welcomed the outsiders and did not rotate their eyes on dumb questions.
When I need a comment for a story, the great champions and head coaches of the game are always ready to talk. You feel kinship with people who are giving so tirelessly.
And then there is temporary and physical proximity.
The aircraft that went down, hitting everyone, was coming from Wichita, ear, where the US Figure Skating Championship ended on Sunday.
I was also in Wichita, covering my 38th National Championship, writing about the current elite of the game, holding with dozens of former contestants, about which I have written and played in my 45 years Know to cover.
The skates who died on Wednesday were trying to join the future aristocracy. He was one of the 150 athletes from the lower competitive levels of the game, invited to a National Development Camp on Monday and Tuesday.
He was undoubtedly honored and excited to be selected. This was an important way on a track that hoped them to take them to citizens – and perhaps beyond.
He was also given the taste of citizens as audiences. I saw and heard them continuously cheering for senior and junior-level skaters, whose achievements they expected to follow.
They mourn people like me who did not meet them, not just because they were young and talented. They mourn because anyone associated with the game, they are part of the family.
The US Figure Skating has now lost some of its next generations as well as coaches and officials and parents who were guiding them.
According to the situation familiar with the situation, those dead include 11 skaters, four coaches, 12 parents and two brothers. “It is difficult to understand,” the person said.
This is unimaginably, the second time we have been in the form of figure skating to break the same heart, as the 1960 Olympic champion Carol Hayes Jenkins mentions me in a message in which it is read, “the tragic and the 1961s of the 1961 Out of understanding and thoughts. ”
On February 15, 1961, the entire 18-member American figure skating team led to the World Championship in Prague in 1961, when its aircraft from New York fell into a Belgian ground, trying to land at its scheduled stop in Brussels. Sixteen people along with skaters – coaches, family members, officials – and 38 other passengers and crew also died.
Figure skating family still reduces that loss in the US. Will not talk about it for many years. Within the months of the accident, a memorial fund was installed which would turn part of the 1961 team’s legacy into financial assistance to many of their successors, and was followed by generations of excellence.
There is a surprisingly tragic link between the 1961 accident and Wednesday. In 1961, five of the dead were Skaters from the respected skating club of Boston, as the famous skater-cook-coach Maribel Vinson Owen. His two daughters were one of the athletes who died on the plane.
Boston’s Skating Club announced on Thursday that it lost six members in the disaster: two skaters, those skaters and mothers of Russian coaches and her husband, Wadim Naomov, 1994 world couple champions, whose son, Maxim, in men Stayed fourth. Single Sunday. Maxim Naomov left Wichita the first a week.
The World Figure Skating Championship is scheduled to be held in Boston on 26-30 March. The US Skaters have a shot on the gold medal in three of the four topics of the game, which must have been something to guess without reservation and if it happens, then celebrate the kidnapping.
For the US Figure Skating Family, any such ceremony will now be bitwatch and muted.