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    D.C. Plane Crash Echoes Boston Skating Club’s 1961 Tragedy

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    Two months after the D.C. plane crash killed 67, including six people affiliated with the Boston club, the members had to prepare for the world championships. Unfathomably, they had a blueprint.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.Paul George, a longtime club member, hugs former Olympic figure skaters Dr. Tenley Albright and Nancy Kerrigan.Sophie Park for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ilia Malinin Wins Skating Championship With ‘Succession’ Theme Song Routine

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      Ilia Malinin, an American teenager, won the men’s World Figure Skating Championships with a performance set to the theme of the HBO series.Like the plot of “Succession,” Ilia Malinin’s winning program for the men’s singles competition at the World Figure Skating Championships on Saturday had a lot of twists: six quadruple jumps that included a quadruple axel, a feat involving four and a half rotations in the air.That those elements were set to the HBO series’ theme song only heightened the drama of Mr. Malinin’s performance.The moody string music that opens the song had been playing for about 30 seconds when Mr. Malinin, a 19-year-old student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., executed a quad axel in a costume that resembled a classic tuxedo. Mr. Malinin, who grew up in Fairfax, is the only skater who has landed that jump in competition; he first did so in 2022.By the time of the “Succession” theme’s piano riffs, he had completed three more quads: a quad lutz, a quad loop and a quad salchow. (His knack for executing quadruple jumps has earned him the nickname Quad God.) Before the end of the roughly four-minute program, he landed two more.Mr. Malinin started skating to the “Succession” theme last fall, but he has yet to watch the show. “I don’t have a subscription to HBO,” he said in an interview. “But if I did get it, I’d definitely watch.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamila Valieva Banned Four Years Over 2022 Olympic Doping Case

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      Valieva, once a 15-year-old gold medal favorite, was punished in a doping case that upended the figure skating competition at the Beijing Games.Kamila Valieva, the teenage Russian figure skater whose positive doping test upended her sport at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, was banned from competition for four years on Monday by the top court in sports.The punishment, announced by a three-member arbitration panel empowered by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, was related to a tainted sample Valieva, who was 15 at the time, gave at a competition. The positive result only emerged two months later — in the middle of the Olympics, and only a day after Valieva had led Russia to victory in the team competition.The ban will be retroactive to Dec. 25, 2021, the arbitrators ruled, meaning it will end in 2025, just in time for Valieva to compete at the next Winter Olympics, in 2026. Now 17, she was ordered to forfeit “any titles, awards, medals, profits, prizes and appearance money” earned after her positive doping sample was collected.Valieva had claimed that she had mistakenly taken a heart medication, Trimetazidine, prescribed for her grandfather. Russia’s anti-doping body had cleared her of any wrongdoing, not because of her reasoning for ingesting the banned substance but because of her age, saying she could not be held responsible because she was a minor at the time, and therefore a “protected person.”The CAS panel, in Monday’s ruling, dismissed the premise that minors competing in adult competitions should be treated different from their rivals.“There is no basis under the rules to treat them any differently from an adult athlete,” the arbitrators wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More