SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
More than a dozen passengers on the American Airlines flight that crashed last night near Washington, D.C., were young, elite figure skaters as well as their coaches and family members. They were returning home from a competition in Wichita, Kansas. And today, the figure skating community is in mourning over their loss. Authorities have said there are no survivors. NPR sports correspondent Becky Sullivan has been talking with some of the people in this tight group. Hi, Becky.
BECKY SULLIVAN, BYLINE: Hi.
PFEIFFER: How much do we know at this point about who exactly was on the plane?
SULLIVAN: Yeah, we're still awaiting confirmation on the full list of names, but I can share details about some of them. Two teenage figure skaters, Jinna Han and Spencer Lane, who were on their way back to their homes in New England - both of them were members of The Skating Club of Boston, which is one of the oldest training clubs in the country. They were traveling with their mothers, Jin Han and Christine Lane, who were also on the flight, along with two coaches who were based in Boston. They were Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, the husband-and-wife pair who were competitors themselves for Russia back in the 1990s. They were world champions then, coaches now. In addition to those six, we know that there were others too, some of them from the D.C. area, although we're still waiting to confirm those details.
PFEIFFER: We mentioned that they were coming home from a competition. Tell us more about why they were in Kansas.
SULLIVAN: Yeah. So there was a major competition in Wichita last week, the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. That wrapped up on Sunday. And then for a few days afterward, U.S. Figure Skating, which is the governing body for the sport in this country, held a development camp for elite, young skaters. So this group was largely returning home from that development camp, which is especially tragic because it's a major achievement to be invited to a camp like that, meaning the athletes who were on the plane were some of the most promising young figure skaters in the country who had just had one of the most exciting achievements of their young careers. And then it, you know, turned into tragedy. These are athletes who may have had dreams of competing in the winter Olympics - not next year - they were a little too young for that probably, but perhaps in 2030.
PFEIFFER: Yeah. So given all that, how is the figure skating community absorbing this news?
SULLIVAN: I mean, obviously, people are devastated. I think I can't emphasize enough that this is just not that big a world - this figure skating community - a very small group of these elite athletes and coaches who are regularly flying all across the country for competitions and training camps. And so to lose them like this has really shocked people. One of them we heard from today is Doug Zeghibe. He's the head of The Skating Club of Boston, that training club that we mentioned that some of these skaters and coaches belong to. And here's how he put it this morning.
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DOUG ZEGHIBE: Skating is a very close and tight-knit community. These kids and their parents, they're here at our facility in Norwood six sometimes seven days a week. It's a close, tight bond. And I think for all of us, we have lost family.
SULLIVAN: I think you can really hear it in his voice there, just how hard this is sitting.
PFEIFFER: Yeah. You know, Becky, at our planning meeting this morning for today's show, one of the staff members mentioned this eerie fact, which is that there was another plane crash in 1961 involving U.S. figure skaters. I hadn't known that. That's true?
SULLIVAN: Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. That was a flight from New York to Brussels that was carrying what was then the entire U.S. Figure Skating team en route to a world competition in Prague. They all died in that crash back then. And so I think that's part of what has been so shocking and upsetting to this community today. You know, back then, it was like, you lost this entire generation of top-level athletes plus their coaches.
And I think those who have been around the U.S. figure skating world for a long time will tell you that it did take decades for the sport here to recover from that crash. And so now today, losing all these talented young skaters and their coaches, there's a sense that, you know, not only is it a loss for right now, but it's also a loss for the future of the sport as well. And folks are just feeling like, how is it possible that this could have happened to us twice?
PFEIFFER: Right, huge reverberations for years to come. That's NPR's Becky Sullivan. Thank you, Becky.
SULLIVAN: You're so welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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