There was a time, not too long ago, when Maxim Naumov was so paralyzed with grief that he could not lace up his figure skates.
Feeling numb, he would sift through childhood photos of himself with his parents, the former world champion pairs skaters Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, trying to remember his life with them.
There he was as a baby, atop his father’s shoulders. And there, the first time he skated, at 2 or 3. His parents are flanking him as he smiles, each holding one of his tiny hands.
After Naumov’s mother and father were killed in the plane crash in Washington, D.C., last year, he could hardly escape his sadness. Reminders of them were everywhere at the Skating Club of Boston, where they had coached him, their only child. Memorials of flowers. Handwritten cards. A life-size portrait of them displayed on an easel.
“All I wanted to do in that moment was lay in my bed or lay on my couch and just rot, essentially,” Naumov, who is 24, said this month. “And it was a moment where I knew that the complete opposite of that was the path.”
Not only did Naumov skate again, but this week, the anniversary of the midair collision, he flies to Milan to compete for the United States at the Winter Olympics, which open Feb. 6.
“We did it,” Naumov said, with tears in his eyes, after being named to the U.S. Olympic team two weeks ago. “We did it together.”
His parents dreamed of this moment ever since they started coaching him when he was 5 — although the plan was that they would be together to celebrate.
On the night of Jan. 29, 2025, Maxim Naumov and his roommate and fellow U.S. national team member, the pairs skater Spencer Howe, were playing video games at home outside Boston when Naumov began to receive frantic text messages about a plane crash in Washington.
His parents had been on their way home from the U.S. Figure Skating national championships in Wichita, Kan. At the last minute, they had changed their flight to fly through Washington. He had traveled home before them and had not heard from them for hours.
At 2 a.m., Naumov, Howe and two others who were connected with the Skating Club of Boston drove to Washington in Howe’s Honda. Mile after mile, for most of an eight-hour journey filled with hope and prayer, Naumov texted his parents, repeatedly asking them if they were OK.
Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, two-time Olympians for Russia who came to the United States in the 1990s, were among the 67 people killed that night when an Army helicopter collided with a passenger jet over the Potomac River. Nearly half of the plane’s passengers were skaters, coaches and their families.
While Naumov stopped his individual training after the crash, he did find the courage to take over the development program his parents founded for children 4 to 7 years old at the Boston club.
Watching the young skaters made him realize that in the chill of the rink, atop the smooth ice, was where he felt the closest to his parents, and where he felt most calm and loved. He still can’t walk through any hallway of the skating club without being hugged by at least one person.
He just wishes he could remember how it felt to be coached by his parents in the early years, when they taught him how to jump like a cricket and spin like a tiny tornado. Even back then, they talked about the Olympics every single day — and continued to mention it to him every single day moving forward.
Naumov says he has been thinking about the Olympics “even before I knew what to think.”
And then one day after the crash, Naumov thought about the 2026 Olympics and said to himself: What if? What if I can do it? What if, despite everything that happened to me, I can go out and do it?
His club supported him as he started to train — and live — again. And many others came to help.
Friends, like Howe, a private in the U.S. Army who plans to become a military chaplain. His godparents, who raced to Massachusetts from their home in Simsbury, Conn., to stay with him, care for him and handle his parents’ paperwork.
And a coach, Vladimir Petrenko, a decades-long family friend. He and his wife, Elena, dropped everything at the International Skating Center of Connecticut, where the Naumovs worked when they first came to the United States, to help Maxim train in Massachusetts. The Connecticut rink was where Maxim Naumov took his first shaky, slippery steps in skates.
“It was pretty difficult because you have to know what he needs, but at the same time we love him first, so we needed to be patient,” Elena Petrenko said, noting that they could all feel the Olympics closing in on them.
Olga Ganicheva, who, with her husband, Aleksey Letov, coaches Howe and his pairs partner, Emily Chan, often shared practice ice with Naumov. At times, she noticed him struggling to focus, as if lost in thick fog.
“You can see in his face and his body that every day it’s hard for him to come to the rink,” she said, before praising him for his remarkable resilience and calling him tough, as his parents were. She said Howe often went out of his way to make Naumov laugh.
“He’d say, ‘Max, if you land this jump, I will buy a steak for you and I’m going to cook it for you!” Ganicheva recalled. “And Max will go fall, fall and then land the jump, and Max will say, ‘Yes, steak today!’ That’s exactly what Max needed sometimes.”
Naumov said Howe’s friendship and willingness to share his Christian faith meant a lot to him as he navigated his grief.
In 2022, when Naumov nearly quit the sport because he was sick of being injured and was clashing with his parents on the ice, he asked to stay at Howe’s place for a few months. He worked at Starbucks as a barista while taking college classes online.
They clicked so well that Naumov stayed until he moved back into his parents’ house last year. They have been through a lot together, and even go to church together.
“I have so much respect and so much love for my brother because, again, he could have gone the opposite way,” Howe said. “What’s made me the proudest to see is that, through all this tragedy, he’s looking for a silver lining instead of letting it tear him apart inside.”
The important supporters over the past year, Naumov said, have been his parents. He hears them talking to him in his head. They are guiding him both on and off the ice, giving him confidence, urging him on with their family motto, “We must fight.” He is convinced that he now has the power of not just one person, but three.
At the national championships this month, where the top three skaters would probably make the Olympic team, he felt their presence.
In the short program, he was fourth. In the free skate two days later, it seemed as if the whole arena was holding its breath, rooting for him.
During that routine, the Petrenkos were trying to hold back tears. Howe, who would end up making the Olympic team with his skating partner, was standing rinkside, saying, “Come on, Max, you can do this. You can do this.” He silently recited the names of Naumov’s parents, pleading with them: “You’re watching over him right now. I can feel your love. You’ve got to help him.”
Overwhelmed by emotion, Naumov felt as if he had floated through that performance and said he didn’t remember much of it. But he was certain that his parents lifted him to a bronze medal that night, breaking the curse of his three consecutive fourth-place finishes.
Afterward, he found a dark corner under the stands to weep.
At nationals, even before he learned that he would make the Olympic team, Naumov stared at the photo of himself with his parents from the day he skated the first time. For maybe 20 minutes, he stared, and he talked to them.
“Look how far we’ve come. Look what we’ve done. Look at all the sacrifices we made, everything that we’ve been through, you know, everything that we planned,” he said. “It’s all coming to fruition.”
Juliet Macur is a national reporter at The Times, based in Washington, D.C., who often writes about America through the lens of sports.
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