Umair
One floor above the ice rinks at the Skating Club of Boston, there’s a lounge that would have hosted a party after January’s U.S. Figure Skating national championships.
Its glass doors would have been thrown open, and its fireplace set aglow, as several hundred people gathered to toast the club’s latest champions, the pairs skaters Alisa Efimova and Misha Mitrofanov, who had won their first national title.
But that celebration never happened. It couldn’t, and it wouldn’t, after six of the club’s members died in a plane crash on Jan. 29 in Washington. Twenty-eight passengers involved in skating, including 11 young athletes and four coaches, were among the 67 people killed that day.
Jinna Han, 13, and Spencer Lane, 16, two of the organization’s up-and-coming skaters, were traveling home with their mothers from a development camp held after the nationals in Wichita., Kan., when an Army helicopter collided with their passenger jet above the Potomac River. No one survived. Two of the club’s coaches — Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, a married couple who were the 1994 world champions in pairs — were also on the plane.
Yet the lounge at the Boston club did not remain empty. In the hours and days after the crash, one by one, or arm in arm, people arrived and filled the space, drawn to the beloved club that has existed for more than a century, and to a community that many consider a second family.
Parents of skaters came. Old and young skaters came. Some of the club’s Olympians, including Tenley Albright, the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in figure skating, in 1956, and Nancy Kerrigan, a two-time Olympic medalist in the ’90s, came.
“We all came here because we didn’t know what else to do,” said Efimova, sitting tall and straight-backed, like a prima ballerina, on one of the room’s couches last Friday. Along the wall next to her was a memorial of photos, tributes and notes to the skaters and coaches who died. Some of the notes were written in children’s shaky handwriting and said things like “I hope you had a happy life!” and “I miss you guys.”
Grief counselors and therapy dogs spent weeks at the skating center, as the athletes and their families leaned on them, and on one another.
But the 2,500-member club has had little time to process the losses as it focuses on an urgent responsibility: It is the local host for the World Figure Skating Championships, being held this week at the TD Garden in Boston, where more than 150 skaters from roughly 50 countries will compete. Efimova and Mitrofanov will perform at worlds, beginning on Wednesday, with their short program.
Unfathomably, there was a blueprint for the club to follow in its effort to steady itself and push ahead.
Not the First Plane Crash
Sixty-four years ago, the entire 18-member U.S. Figure Skating team died in a plane crash outside of Brussels, en route to the 1961 world championships in Prague. Of the 73 people killed, 10 were members of the Boston club, including five U.S. skaters.
Paul George, a junior pairs skater at the club back then and a longtime member, said he felt vacant when he heard of yet another crash involving the skating world. “It’s incredible, just incredible,” he said, shaking his head.
The morning after the crash in January, he awoke to the news, just as he had in 1961, when his coach, Maribel Vinson Owen, and her two daughters, Laurence and Maribel, were among those killed.
George had been close friends with the 16-year-old Laurence, an Olympian in 1960 and the reigning national singles champion. They had trained for hours together each day, and he had even taught her how to drive. Two days before the crash, she had been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, floating backward on the ice on one foot, smiling and wearing a bright red skating dress. The magazine called her “America’s most exciting girl skater.”
Laurence, pronounced lo-RAHNS, hailed from a family of champions: Her mother won nine national singles titles, a U.S. record she held alone for nearly 70 years until Michelle Kwan tied it in 2005. Laurence’s sister, Maribel, was the reigning pairs champion with her partner, Dudley Richards, who also died in the crash.
“I’ve said many times since that day that the music stopped the day of the crash,” said George, 83, a retired corporate lawyer and past vice president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “It felt like weeks since anyone could get back onto the ice. It was silent, just silent.”
Instead of training, George attended funeral after funeral, serving as a pallbearer at one, and fought hard to comprehend the devastation. His studies at Harvard kept his mind busy, he said, distracting him from the grief.
When he returned to the rink with his sister, Elizabeth, who was his skating partner, he had a renewed sense of purpose, focus and seriousness. He began the then-novel practice of visualizing his routines before executing them, recalling Vinson Owen’s high expectations and trying to honor her with his performances.
“We came back and said, ‘We’ve got to have more resolve to move forward,’” he said of himself and Elizabeth. And they did just that. At the 1962 junior national championships, they won the gold medal.
“The skaters affected by the latest crash are probably going through the very same things we did,” he said. “They’ve lost friends. Now they miss their friends. Now they are thinking, What do I do next? How do I, you know, get on with life?”
George graduated from Harvard and went into the Navy, where he was an officer during the Vietnam War. After marrying, he had a daughter in 1967. He and his wife, Helen, named her Laurence.
When Vinson Owen’s mother, Gertrude Vinson, held the baby for the first time, George said, “it meant something.”
Later, he managed the U.S. Figure Skating Memorial Fund, which was established after the 1961 crash and has since given skaters millions of dollars for education or training.
“You move on, but you never forget it,” George said. “I think the impact of this on the current skaters will reveal itself over time.”
A Second Home
When the Skating Club of Boston moved from its home on the banks of the Charles River, not far from Harvard, to the suburb of Norwood, Mass., in 2020, it traded its barnlike building and single rink for a $68-million skating center that had everything an athlete would need. It was a modern, 180,000-square-foot skating haven with three rinks, an academic center where students and parents could study or work, a sports medicine center and a museum named for Dick Button, the trailblazing two-time Olympic champion and club member who landed the first triple jump and double axel in competition.
Parents and skaters would spend hours there, bonding with one another. Jinna Han’s mother, Jin Hee Han, was a fixture at the club, and even spent days last August polishing the hundreds of trophies in the museum. Spencer Lane’s mother, Christine, studied for her real estate license in the academic room, and knitted sweaters and socks in the lounge.
In the weeks after the January crash, just as in 1961, the skaters, coaches and families at the club tried to regroup. But there was no escaping it: Life had changed.
Reminders of the crashes, present and past, were at every turn. Visitors walking through the front doors encountered a wall of sweet scents from the dozens of flowers, sent from as far as Finland. In an interior hallway where the athletes laced up their skates, the chairs used by Han and Lane sat empty and became spots to leave notes and flowers.
Memorials to the 1961 crash victims already existed: A sculpture called Ascension. A memorial plaque. Photos upon photos. Along one giant wall high above the 2,500-seat rink named the Tenley E. Albright Performance Center are photos and write-ups of the club’s history, including a section about the crash. Snapshots of newspapers from the time showed headlines that declared, “Boston Skaters Die in Jet Crash: U.S. Skating Team of 18 Wiped Out.” A photo of Laurence Owen, about 12 feet by five feet, is impossible to miss from the ice below.
At the rink, the mourning continues and, as one coach said, the cool competitiveness among skaters has softened into hugs and concern for everyone’s well-being. Ten young athletes who were at the development camp in Kansas continue to train at the club. And Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shihskova left behind the many skaters they coached, including their only child, Maxim. Three days before the crash, he had finished fourth at nationals.
His skating club teammate, Jimmy Ma, ranked fifth. Ma had trained with Han and called her his “little sister.” Her parents were part of his inner circle, he said.
“Skating is a good way to escape it all, but everywhere you look around, we’re reminded of them and so it’s hard to get away from it,” Ma said last Friday at the club. “But losing them put things into perspective. Like, who cares about skating anymore? There’s much bigger things.”
A New Outlook
With that changed attitude, Ma went to the Four Continents Figure Skating Championships in Seoul at the end of February and had the best performance of his career. At 29, he won the bronze, his first international championship medal, and to honor the memory of the friends he lost, held their photos up to the cameras in the kiss-and-cry area where skaters wait for their scores.
It was important for him to be poised because he knew he was being watched, especially by the young skaters back at the club.
“The kids I see every day, the ones who look up to skaters like me, don’t know how to process this kind of heavy stuff, so we all have to lead by example on how we handle it,” he said. “There are people depending on us to show the way forward.”
In turn, Ma also has depended on others to help him through this. He lives with Efimova and Mitrofanov, and they have talked with one another about their sadness.
“We definitely haven’t felt alone,” Mitrofanov said, “and are thankful for that.”
Many nights, the trio of twenty-somethings heads over to the home of their coaches, Olga Ganicheva and Aleksey Letov, to spend time in the couple’s sauna, partake in Letov’s barbecued meals, or join others at a communal table for Ganicheva’s specialty stews.
Jinna’s father, Joon Young Han, is often there because he hasn’t returned to his now empty home since the crash, Ganicheva said. Jinna was an only child.
After 12-hour days at the rink, Ganicheva said she often comes home to a house full of people.
“We have a skater, a young boy, who still text messages Spencer, saying, ‘Hey Spencer, how are you? How were your jumps today? What did you land? Are you better than me already?’” Ganicheva said. “It’s good for the skaters to let their emotions out.”
For her, however, it’s a different story. “For my skaters, I have to be strong and not show the pain inside, never cry — until I go home and am by myself, of course,” she said.
She’s not worried that emotions will overwhelm Efimova and Mitrofanov at worlds because, she said, “Misha and Alisa are good at keeping things inside. It’s what you learn to do since you are 4 years old and train every day to be mentally so strong.”
Yet on Friday, just before Efimova and Mitrofanov toured the club museum to see their nationals trophy on display, Ganicheva sat them down for an important talk.
She told them that they shouldn’t feel pressure to succeed at the world championships when they have endured so much heartache.
Just enjoy being out there on the ice, she said, struggling to keep her emotions in check, because everyone knows — more than ever — that it’s a gift to wake up every day.
