U.S. figure skater Maxim Naumov carried the memory of his late parents with him to the Olympics on Tuesday night, delivering an emotional and heartfelt short program at the Milan-Cortina Games that fulfilled a dream they had long shared together.
Naumov’s parents, former pairs world champions Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, were among the 67 people killed—more than two dozen of them members of the figure skating community—when American Airlines Flight 5342 crashed into a military helicopter on approach to Ronald Reagan National Airport and fell into the icy Potomac River on January 29, 2025.
One of the last conversations Naumov had with his parents was about what it would take to make the Olympics.
“I’ve been inspired by them since day one, ever since we stepped on the ice together,” said Naumov, who brought an old photograph of that moment to the kiss-and-cry at the Milano Ice Skating Arena. The photo shows a little tyke standing between his parents as he stepped foot on the ice for the first time, the three of them all smiling for the camera.
“It’s not necessarily thinking about them specifically,” Naumov said, “but their presence. Feeling their presence. With every glide and step that I made on the ice, I couldn’t help but feel their support, almost like a chess piece on a chessboard.”
What made one of the feel-good stories of the Winter Games even more special was Naumov’s performance. While he was a long shot to make the top 10 at the Olympics, much less land on the podium, the 24-year-old nevertheless delivered one of the best short programs of his career.
He opened with a quad salchow as his godmother, Gretta Bogdan, watched from the stands. He followed up with a triple axel and a triple lutz-triple toe loop to finish out the program.
As the last notes of “Nocturne No. 20” by Frederic Chopin reverberated through the arena and the crowd rose to its feet, Naumov slid to a stop on his knees and looked to the sky, telling his parents: “Look at what we’ve done.”
“I didn’t know if I was going to cry, smile, or laugh,” he said afterward, “and all I could do was look up at them. And man, I still can’t believe what just happened. I think it’s going to take me a few hours or maybe a few weeks to know.”
His score of 85.65 was enough to make it through the short program, giving him another opportunity to perform when the men’s free skate takes place Friday night.
The plane carrying Naumov’s parents also had aboard 11 young skaters, two other coaches, and several family members who had been attending a development camp in Wichita, Kansas, following the 2025 national championships. Naumov’s parents were coaches at the Skating Club of Boston, which lost six members in the midair crash.
Naumov had flown out earlier, shortly after he had finished in fourth place for the third consecutive year.
“I can’t describe how difficult it was at the very beginning, and through month after month of really just trying my hardest to keep a positive mindset, and focus on day to day,” Naumov told CBS News Boston last month during his Olympic training at the Skating Club. “Thankfully, skating became a tool that actually helped me overcome that.”
The idea of fulfilling the Olympic dream he harbored with his parents pushed him on. When he finished third at the U.S. championships in January, his spot was all but secured.
“To be honest,” Naumov said Tuesday night, “I wasn’t thinking about executing anything perfectly or anything like that. I wanted to go out there and just give my heart out. Leave everything out there. Have no regrets. And that’s exactly what I felt.”
“To deal with the tragedy that he’s dealt with, and like he said, get up and do the day. And that’s what he’s done. He’s done one day at a time,” Katharine Steeger, the skating club’s director of membership services, told CBS Boston. “To have Max start us off with such an amazing skate for him, it’s just, there’s really no words.”
This marks the first time since 2014 that the Skating Club of Boston has sent athletes to the Olympics. Along with Naumov, they also sent figure skating pair Emily Chan and Spencer Akira Howe.
In the crowd Tuesday, dozens of American flags waved when Naumov’s program came to a conclusion. At one end of the arena, a fan held up a big flag that read, “Tomorrow’s Champions,” and carried the logo of the Skating Club of Boston.
“Tomorrow’s Champions” is the name of the skating school his parents founded and which Naumov now oversees.
“From the time that my name was announced in the warm-up to right before the skate,” Naumov said, “I felt it—the crowd, the energy, the roar. It’s like a buzz, you know? In your body. I couldn’t help but just embrace it. Embrace that love.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/maxim-naumov-olympic-debut-after-parents-killed-midair-dc-collision/
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