After plane crash, Leawood skating coach grieves champions she grew up with in Russia
Marina Eltsova was back home in Leawood when she texted her long-time friend Evgenia Shishkova pictures from the figure skating competition in Wichita days before.
Eltsova had captured photos of Shishkova’s son, Maxim Naumov, with his medal. She thought her friend — who she trained with at the same rink in Russia three decades ago — would like to have them.
She also told Shishkova that she and her daughter may go to Boston for the International Skating Union World Skating Championships in late March. She said she would need to find lodging.
“You can always stay with us,” Shishkova texted her friend Wednesday morning. And Eltsova figured she’d get back to her once her plans were final.
Hours later, Shishkova and her husband, Vadim Naumov — internationally-known figure skaters from Russia who won the pairs title at the 1994 World Figure Skating Championship — boarded an American Airlines flight in Wichita. Just before landing in Washington D.C., that plane collided mid-air with an Army Black Hawk helicopter over the Potomac River.
The plane had 60 passengers and four crew members on board, and the helicopter was carrying three soldiers. Authorities have said there were no survivors.
Eltsova didn’t know about the crash until early Thursday morning when her phone filled with text messages from Russia. Her former skating partner Andrei Bushkov even texted, “Is it true?”
“And I’m like, I’m not even sure why I’m getting so many text messages, and what’s happening, you know?” Eltsova said. “I’m like, ‘I need to sit down.’ Your heart just knows something happened.”
The first headline she saw said “plane crash.” Then there was a picture of Shishkova and Naumov.
“I couldn’t even speak,” she said. “It’s hard to believe it happened. I don’t know where the helicopter came from. I can’t even watch it. I know there are videos of what happened. I just did not want to see it.
“We skated together. We grew up in Saint Petersburg and we skated on the same ice. We didn’t have the same coaches, we competed against each other.”
Shishkova and Naumov, she said, “were a couple all their life.”
Two years after Shishkova and Naumov won the world championship, Eltsova and Bushkov grabbed the pairs title. Competitors on the ice, close friends off.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Eltsova, who is a full-time esthetician and coaches figure skating part-time. “It’s surreal. It doesn’t feel that it happened actually. It just feels like it cannot happen. A nightmare.”
More than a dozen coaches and skaters with the United States figure skating team were on the flight from Wichita to Washington, D.C. The skaters were part of the National Development Team, a training program for top juvenile, intermediate and novice figure skaters.
In total, 14 people from the figure skating world were on the flight, six from The Skating Club of Boston. That included Shishkova and Naumov, two of their teen skaters and their mothers. The coaches’ son, Maxim, was not on the flight because he flew home earlier in the week.
“Oh my gosh, I cannot imagine what he feels,” Eltsova said of Maxim, who she says is a “beautiful skater.” “It just makes me cry.”
In a news conference Thursday morning in Massachusetts, Doug Zeghibe, executive director and CEO of The Skating Club of Boston, said Shishkova and Naumov came to the club in 2017. The couple were working at a training camp in Connecticut when the Boston club reached out to them.
The coaches were “very popular with families,” Zeghibe said, and had “proven success.”
Eltsova said her friends were “very disciplined and very caring people. And very supportive to their skaters and very, very, very hard working people.”
To the point that Eltsova said she once asked Shishkova if she ever took time off.
In that last text she sent her friend Tuesday night, Eltsova asked if Shishkova and Naumov planned to go to the World Championship and watch the performances.
“She said, ‘We will be working for sure,’” Eltsova said. “‘I don’t know yet how much we will watch skating.’”
Eltsova no longer plans on going to Boston in March. She just can’t imagine herself being there at the world competition at this point. Not without her friends, the couple she came to know on the ice in Saint Petersburg, Russia so long ago.
“I can’t do it emotionally,” she said. “It just happened. Maybe if it wasn’t in Boston, you know. It’s just super hard. Emotional.”
This story was originally published January 31, 2025 at 6:37 PM.
