On Feb. 15, 1961, the entire U.S. figure skating team was killed when Sabena Flight 458 crashed on its approach to Brussels Airport. Among the dead were 10 members of the best skating club in the United States: the Boston Skating Club.
“Almost half of everybody on board that [Sabena] plane were from this club,” the group's executive director Doug Zeghibe said Thursday.
It took seven long years for U.S. figure skating to begin to recover. The lovely and athletic Peggy Fleming won Olympic gold in 1968. However, the Boston Skating Club had a huge hole in its heart and, in some ways, has never recovered from that massive blow.
“It had long, long, reaching implications for this skating club and for the sport in this country. Because when you lose coaches like this, you lose the future of the sport as well,” Zeghibe said.
“It’s been a long time in redeveloping it, and I personally feel that this club, the Skating Club of Boston, has just now, almost 60 years later, have been coming out of the shadow of that 1961 crash. It 'is particularly devastating.'"
Two Russians who coached American and world champions died in the mid-air collision between an American Airlines passenger jet and an Army Black Hawk helicopter on Wednesday. Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov won the pairs title at the 1994 World Championships and competed twice in the Olympics. They were coaching youngsters in Boston and were loved by both the skaters and their parents.
“Very popular with families, proven success,” Zeghibe said, “which is why I think they had so many kids at the championships and at the national development camp.”
In addition to the coaches, two promising skaters died in the crash: Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, who were accompanied by their mothers, Jin Han and Christine Lane.
The repeated tragedy is almost too much to bear. The figure skating community is tight-knit, as "skating moms" are much like "hockey moms" who give their kids every possible advantage. Parents know other parents, coaches know other coaches, and the skaters, although competitors, are bound by the shared dream of Olympic Gold.
The 1961 crash still weighs heavily on the small figure skating community.
At a commemorative event at the club’s facility in Norwood in 2021, 1956 Olympic gold medalist Tenley Albright — after whom the Norwood facility’s Olympic-sized arena is named — reflected on how the crash affected the club’s history.
“I am sitting in this trophy room, thinking of the trophies that would be here had this tragedy not happened,” Albright said.
The most famous victim of that 1961 crash was Maribel Vinson-Owen, an Olympic and world medalist from Winchester who become one of the sport’s premier coaches. Among her proteges were Albright, a two-time world champion along with her Olympic title, and Frank Carroll, who would later become a top coach himself and trained a trio of world champion skaters in Linda Fratianne, Michelle Kwan, and 2010 Olympic champion Evan Lysacek.
“It was so sensational, so devastating, that I blocked it out of mind,” Carroll said at the Skating Club of Boston event in 2021. Later, he said, when he was coaching, “I couldn’t call up Maribel and ask her what I was doing wrong. She was dead, and I wasn’t going to be able to call her again.”
The parents, Jin Han and Christine Lane, were “role model parents in youth sports, and you don’t always get that,” Zeghibe said. “Our kids compete hard on the ice against each other, but when they step off the ice, it’s a pretty tight-knit group. The parents as well.”
In 50 years, another memorial service will be held for the victims of this plane crash. And the memory of the 1961 crash, along with the future champion figure skaters who were never able to realize their potential, will be remembered.
The memories will be bittersweet as we recall them having "slipped the surly bonds of Earth / and touched the face of God."
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