SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
In the world of figure skating, this week's fatal plane collision near Washington, D.C., resurfaced memories of a similar disaster more than 60 years ago. A flight carrying the U.S. Figure Skating team crashed in Belgium and killed dozens of athletes and coaches and their family members. That loss affected the sport for years. With the help of member station GBH in Boston, NPR's Becky Sullivan has the story.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: On Thursday at The Skating Club of Boston, a man named Paul George stopped to look at an old photo.
PAUL GEORGE: These - this is Greg Kelley, Maribel Owen and Dudley Richards. They were a pair team. Laurence Owen and Bradley Lord...
SULLIVAN: Back in 1961, George was an aspiring figure skater. He trained at the skating club, where he worked out alongside some of the very best skaters in the whole country. He said they all posed for this team photo at the National Championships that January.
GEORGE: So that's the team that competed in '61. Several, of course, lost their lives in the plane crash.
SULLIVAN: It was just a few weeks later that the senior U.S. figure skating team boarded a plane in New York bound for Brussels. They were headed to Prague for the world championships. Just before the Boeing 707 landed in Brussels, something went wrong, and the plane went down. In total, 18 U.S. figure skaters died in the crash, along with six coaches and some family members and officials.
GEORGE: It was stunning. I was 19 years old. It was a stunning moment because I lost, in that plane crash, people I trained with, people that I socialized with. We all grew up together. We horsed around together. So it was a very, very stark moment.
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PEGGY FLEMING: When that happened, it just, like - everything just took the rug out from underneath everyone.
SULLIVAN: Peggy Fleming was only 12 then but already a promising young talent. Her coach at the time was on that flight, as she recalled to StoryCorps a few years ago.
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FLEMING: I mean, not only losing all the talent in skating, all of the role models for people like me to look up to were all gone, but also our top coaches all across the country were gone.
SULLIVAN: The crash was a shock to the system for U.S. figure skating. It took everyone a little while to even put on their skates again. For Fleming, just a kid then, the only way she could ease back in, she said, was by taking lessons from a friend of her old coaches, someone who could share what they were all going through.
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: See the plie in the first part of the - that jump.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: Beautiful.
SULLIVAN: Ultimately, Fleming and George say they ended up more committed to the sport. By the mid-'60s, Fleming was winning championships. In 1968, she won the Olympic gold medal...
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SULLIVAN: ...A win that was especially emotional given what had happened just seven years before, as she and George remembered together on StoryCorps.
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FLEMING: For me to make it was like - it gave hope to, I think, the general public in the U.S. And maybe...
GEORGE: It gave hope to the sport, too, because...
FLEMING: Yeah.
GEORGE: ...The sport had really...
FLEMING: That you can do it.
GEORGE: ...After the...
FLEMING: Yeah.
GEORGE: ...Crash, it had a lot of rebuilding.
SULLIVAN: Still, for years, the shadow hung over the world of figure skating. Younger kids born after the crash grew up feeling like it was something they could never talk about, said Doug Zeghibe, who now runs The Skating Club of Boston.
DOUG ZEGHIBE: I hope we don't have the same situation here. I hope we can be a little bit healthier about it, talk about it, acknowledge it, celebrate these kids, celebrate these coaches and their parents - the kids' parents - and keep them alive that way.
SULLIVAN: Aboard Wednesday's flight were about a dozen skaters, all of them teenagers or even younger, who were coming home after taking part in a prestigious development camp in Wichita. At least four coaches were on the plane, too, and some family members traveling with them. Some were from the D.C. area. Others skated in Delaware, and a few were from the Boston club, the very place where George trained once upon a time.
GEORGE: I describe it as the day the music stopped. The music didn't play. The ice wasn't covered. There was nobody on it for a couple of weeks. I feel the same here today. The ice is empty. There's not a soul out there. I think that will go on for a bit, and then people will come back and work harder.
SULLIVAN: On Instagram, the accounts of victims still have the fresh photos from this week's development camp - group shots of happy kids, elite young athletes beaming with pride and excitement at their accomplishments, the same as it was in that old 1961 team photo of George and his fellow skaters.
With help from GBH in Boston, I'm Becky Sullivan, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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