Figure skating coaches and former world pairs champions Vadim Naumov, 55, and Evgenia Shishkova, 52, were among those who are presumed dead in the fatal aircraft collision in Washington on Wednesday.
Doug Zeghibe, the executive director of the Skating Club of Boston, identified the two coaches as having been on the plane traveling from Wichita, Kansas to Washington. He described the couple, who were married, as ‘top coaches’ and said they had been working at the club since 2017.
‘They were very much a part of our building the competitive skating program here at the Skating Club of Boston,’ Zeghibe said in a news conference. ‘When you lose coaches like this, you lose the future of the sport, as well.’
Naumov and Shishkova were born and raised in Russia and led the nation as one of its top pairs teams in the early 1990s. The pair won the 1994 world championships and competed at two editions of the Winter Olympics, finishing fifth in 1992 and placing fourth two years later.
Ludmila Velikova, who trained the pair when they were children, told Reuters that they were ‘talented and beautiful people.’
‘They were like my own children,’ Velikova told the news agency. ‘What’s happened is awful. The best people have been taken away from us.’
Zeghibe described Naumov as ‘an old-school coach’ and Shishkova as exceedingly resilient. ‘You couldn’t see Evgenia and not just break into a smile,’ he said.
The two took pride in coaching their son, Maxim Naumov, who placed fourth at the U.S. national championships in Wichita on Sunday. Zeghibe said Maxim traveled back to Boston with him on Monday, so he was not on the fatal flight that collided with a military helicopter two days later.
‘It’s well known that Mom was always too nervous to watch him skate,’ Zeghibe said, choking back tears. ‘But his dad was with him, and Dad was in the kiss-and-cry (on Sunday), sharing his great performance.’