US figure skating treads an unfortunately familiar ground: Rebuilding after aviation tragedy

There are no words to comfort anybody who’s been affected by a plane crash. In an instant, many lives can be violently cut short – drastically and forever changing the futures of the friends and family who are left behind.

It is particularly devastating whenever a large group of people is traveling together. Suddenly, a whole community is plunged into mourning for the lives that are lost, the dreams that are dashed and the potential that will never be fulfilled. It also often imperils the very existence of the project they’d been working on.

In the early 1960s, Atlanta was on the cusp of desegregation and investment was starting to flow in. The city’s leaders in arts dreamed of elevating the High Museum of Art into a world-class institution and their plans were taking shape as they embarked on a group trip to Europe; sadly, they never returned.

One hundred twenty-two people died that day. Everyone from the Atlanta group, 106 of the city’s most dedicated champions of art, perished in the wreckage of an Air France jet on the outskirts of Paris in 1962. The group comprised of artists, collectors, patrons and board members, among others, and their dream for improving Atlanta died with them. Many of the city’s artists today lament that the Orly crash robbed Atlanta of its future, decades of progress lost as the visual arts scene instead flourished elsewhere.

The impact can be just as acute whenever a sports club is in the wrong place at the wrong time. While aviation disasters are fortunately rare, there are too many examples of teams that have perished on snowy runways or rural hillsides; disasters that have consequences for a program that might take a generation or more to rebuild.

It’s too soon to fully comprehend the loss of so many talented young figure skaters in January’s Washington, DC, crash, when American Airlines flight 5342 collided with a Black Hawk helicopter on its final approach to the runway at Washington Reagan National Airport. But it’s clear that the loss is profound, 14 young members of the US Figure Skating team were on board. Many were on a trajectory to possibly compete in the 2030 Winter Olympics in the French Alps.

Tragically, the same figure skating program had already experienced such loss. In 1961, the 18-member team was heading to the world championships in Prague when their plane crashed in Brussels. Everybody on board perished, the death toll also including coaches, judges and team officials. The World Championships were cancelled, and the Americans had to start from scratch ahead of the 1964 Olympics. Most of their athletes were too young to compete in Innsbruck, and it was something of an achievement that they still won a medal.

The latest crash is particularly tragic – some of the skaters weren’t even teenagers yet – and the loss of their coaches will make it even harder to train the athletes who will inevitably now step into their skates.

When Brazil’s Chapecoense football team headed to Colombia in November 2016, they wouldn’t have imagined that anything could stop them. They’d been promoted four times in just eight years and were about to play in the biggest game in their history – the final of the Copa Sudamericana tournament.

But when LaMia flight 2933 was just 11 miles from landing in Medellin, the lights in the cabin went dark – the plane had run out of fuel. Shortly afterwards it crashed into a mountain ridge, killing 71 of the 77 people on board. Only three players survived. Virtually the whole squad, its coaches and front office staff were killed.

Forty-eight hours later, when the game should have been played against Atlético Nacional, the club’s fans gathered at their home stadium in Chapeco to mourn their loss. One of the most poignant scenes witnessed that night was of the players who’d not made the trip, men who’d been injured or who’d been cut from the squad, linking hands and walking a lap of the field. The shock and pain were etched deep into their faces.

Chapecoense were subsequently awarded the trophy for a game they never played, but it was a hollow victory – there was nothing to celebrate. A few weeks later, the trophy was seen in the corner of their locker room, almost out of sight, behind a pair of goalkeeper’s gloves. The club still plays on, but they’ve since dropped out of Serie A, the top division in Brazil, and we will never know what might have been.

Since the 1930s, when the Winnipeg Toilers became the first known sports team to be involved in a fatal aviation accident, dozens of teams all over the world have suffered the same fate.

Six players from the Czech national ice hockey team were lost in the English Channel in 1948, and in 1949 the famous Torino soccer club were effectively wiped out in a crash just outside their home airport. At the time, Torino FC were regarded as one of the best in the world, and – although the club eventually rebuilt – Il Toro never recovered its former glory. At the time of the crash, Torino had won five consecutive league titles in Italy. Only once in the 76 years since then have they been champions again.

The 1958 Egyptian national fencing team, the 1970 Puerto Rico national women’s volleyball team, the 1980 US amateur boxing team and the 1993 Zambia national soccer team have all been devastated by aviation disasters. The fate of Uruguay’s Old Christians Rugby Club and the Marshall college football team have been immortalized in cinema, but there is nothing poetic about sports tragedies of such scale.

In the face of such catastrophic loss, sport itself seems trivial, but often it’s the community of the team that helps those left behind pull through. In the wake of the latest crash in Washington, DC, the former Olympic star Nancy Kerrigan traveled to the Skating Club of Boston. Speaking through her tears, a distraught Kerrigan told reporters, “Not sure how to process it, which is why I’m here. We just wanted to be here and be part of our community. We are strong, and I guess it’s just how we respond to it. My response was to be with people I care about, and I love, and I needed support.”

Those who are passionate about sports often debate the ifs and the buts, what could have been and what should have been – if only this goal had been scored or that player hadn’t been injured. But speculating on what an athlete or a team might have accomplished if not for a mass tragedy seems tragically futile.

When Manchester United won the 1968 European Cup final at Wembley, one of their star players excused himself from the celebratory dinner. A decade earlier, Bobby Charlton had made it out of the wreckage of their team plane on the runway at Munich airport. A victorious flight home from Belgrade had turned into a disaster for one of the best young sides in the world. Eight players, including some of Charlton’s closest friends, had died.

In the span of just 10 years, somehow the Manchester United Football Club had rebuilt and established themselves as the top team in Europe, but Charlton could never forget. Instead of celebrating with his new teammates, he went back up to his hotel room and cried.

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