Passengers aboard the American Airlines flight that collided with an Army helicopter and crashed into the Potomac River included athletes returning from the U.S.

Vadim Naumov, a coach at the Skating Club of Boston, was among the victims of a plane crash near Ronald Reagan National Airport outside of Washington, D.C. Wednesday night. Naumov was traveling with his wife, Evgenia Shishkova, as well as two athletes from the club and their mothers.

Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov won a world championship title together in pairs skating in 1994 and narrowly missed out on Olympic medals, before moving to the U.S. and coaching generations of

Once again, figure skaters representing the past, present and future of the sport perished in a catastrophic plane crash.

World champion figure skaters, a pilot planning his wedding and teenaged skaters seen as the "future of the sport" were among the 67 victims of the deadly midair collision between a commercial jet and a U.

An American Airlines flight tragically collided with a Black Hawk helicopter on January 29, 2025, carrying two Russian figure skaters. Learn more about them here.

The Russian news agency Tass reported that Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, a married couple who were the 1994 world champions in pairs figure skating and coached in the U.S., were aboard the plane.

Russian-born ice skating coaches and former world champions Yevgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov were aboard the American Airlines plane that crashed into the Potomac River in Washington on Wednesday night,