Olympic icon Peggy Fleming was visiting a friend in California on the morning of Jan. 30 when her husband Greg Jenkins called from their home in Colorado to tell her about a plane crash in Washington, D.C., involving members of the U.S. figure skating community, young skaters and their parents and coaches.
As she watched the news on television, her mind raced to another place, another time, another tragedy.
“What a flashback it was,” she said in a phone interview earlier this week. “It was like it was happening all over again.”
On Feb. 15, 1961, Fleming was a promising 12-year-old skater in Southern California when she awoke to the news that her coach, William Kipp, and the entire U.S. figure skating delegation — 18 skaters and 16 officials, coaches, judges and family members — had been killed in a plane crash near Brussels on the way to the world championships in Prague.
‘I heard it right before I went to school that day,” Fleming said. “My mom had seen it on television. And I just couldn’t believe it. It was just unreal. So I did go to school — you just don’t know the impact at that age — and I think of what a disaster that really was, and all those talented skaters, their lives just cut short, and all the top coaches in the U.S. were gone.”
This month, as Fleming began to process the horror of the mid-air collision at Reagan National Airport that killed 11 skaters, four coaches and 13 family members, a friend told her about a memorial skating show, Legacy on Ice, that was being planned at Capital One Arena in Washington.
Fleming contacted U.S. Figure Skating and offered to be a part of the show. “It’s all so tragic,” she said. “We want the families to know we care.”
So this weekend, 76-year-old Peggy Fleming is coming to Washington to participate in the Sunday afternoon show that will honor the 67 victims of the air disaster, including the young skaters and members of the skating community who were killed on their way home from a national development camp after the U.S. championships in Wichita.
In this way, she is serving as a bridge between her sport’s two unspeakable tragedies, 64 years apart. “It just brings back so many memories,” she said. “I feel so bad for all these families. It’s heartbreaking.”
Fleming said she will not be skating Sunday but rather serving as a presenter offering an introduction during a segment of the show.
“Are you kidding?” she said with a laugh. “I’m not even bringing my skates. I’m just there to support.”
Her presence at the show is especially meaningful, said 1988 Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano, who is co-hosting the show with 1992 Olympic gold medalist Kristi Yamaguchi.
“She saved figure skating,” Boitano said Thursday in a phone interview. “Out of the ashes comes the phoenix. She was the phoenix.”
Spurred on by two coaches who came to the United States to find work after the crash — first England’s John Nicks for a year, then Italy’s Carlo Fassi for the length of her competitive career — Fleming won five national titles from 1964-68 and the gold medal at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble, France. Her victory launched figure skating into the television age, so it was fitting that she went on to commentate on the sport with the late Dick Button for 28 years on ABC and ESPN.
“She had everything come together to make a champion,” Nicks, now 95, said over the phone Thursday. “Her physique, the self confidence to perform under pressure, being such a likeable person — many, many things went into being Peggy Fleming.”
“The ultimate icon of the sport,” Boitano said. “When you think of figure skating, you think of Peggy Fleming.”