Charlie White awakened Thursday morning to texts asking if he was O.K. He was; but no one really was. American Eagle Flight 5342 had left Wichita, Kans., where White had just been, and crashed into a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan National Airport. All 67 people aboard the two aircrafts are presumed dead, including at least 14 from the figure-skating community. Recovery efforts are still ongoing and all of the victims have yet to be identified. 

White, a former Olympic gold medalist ice dancer, is 37. He has not competed in almost a decade, so in that sense, he is no longer a skater. But he will always be a skater, and when I saw him Friday, he was skating. White and his wife, former Olympian Tanith Belbin White, coach 14 skaters at the Michigan Ice Dance Academy. Ten of them had just returned from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Wichita.

When White saw the news about the crash, his mind quickly did the painful math. The championships had ended Sunday. Flight 5342 left Wichita on Wednesday. Any skater on the flight was probably coming from the National Development Camp, which is held after the championships, “meaning specifically that they were young and have their whole lives ahead of them,” White says. “So I think, trying to digest all of that … you know, first of all, it seems like it’s not possible. There is no way to really wrap your way around the tragedy. [Then we’re] sort of like: ‘What’s the next best thing we can do?’”

The answer, of course, was to pull their loved ones close.

For Charlie and Tanith, that meant answering questions from their seven-year-old son.

It also meant heading to the rink.

They were supposed to go to Arctic Edge in Canton, Mich., anyway, but White says “it’s hard to look at a day and call it a training day in the face of something like that.” Charlie and Tanith found themselves with a task larger than teaching spins and lifts. Charlie sums it up beautifully:

“Trying to responsibly shepherd young people through the pain of reality is the duty of responsible adults.”

There is no way to describe exactly how this week feels in the American figure skating world, because not everybody processes it the same way. Some were close to people on the plane. Others feel a kinship because of their shared passion. But it’s fair to say the tragedy resonated with everybody in a deeper way because there were skaters and parents and coaches on that plane. As White says: “We go through something really specific together from a young age, and there’s certainly a bonding process and a shared understanding of what it means to exist within this ecosystem.”

Talking to kids about a tragedy is a job nobody wants, but it is also the job White chose, even if he didn’t think about it that way at the time. When White and his skating partner Meryl Davis retired, he studied philosophy at the University of Michigan. He says “a lot of that was sort of just like, ‘Hey, I’m an Olympic champion. What does that mean?’”

White considered pursuing a career in academia. But he remembered how he felt as a kid whenever he was around an Olympic champion: “This guy knows what’s going on.” When he became an Olympic champion himself, he felt “a huge responsibility, because I didn’t always feel like I had the answers, even for myself. That was a point of insecurity for me.” After college, he decided his best chance to have an impact on people’s lives was to go where they already listened to him.

“I realized that it was important for me to be able to come back to skating,” he says. “I think fundamentally, as much as I want all of my skaters to succeed, and you know, in turn, win the Olympics themselves, I also feel deeply responsible to their well-being and helping them understand how they can curate their own process through this craziness—to find the best versions of themselves within the thing that they’re passionate about.”

This tragedy will always be part of the U.S. figure skating story. It will lead to memorials and tributes and moments of silence at all the big events. But at heart, it’s not a figure-skating story at all. It’s a human tragedy. And the people who understand that the best are skaters.

“[It] comes with an understanding of the opportunity that all of these people had in the world … all of the love that the world is going to be devoid of now that they’re gone,” White says. “The fact that they were skaters or otherwise, it doesn’t matter. They were people and their lives matter.”


This article was originally published on www.si.com as Tight-Knit U.S. Figure Skating Community Deeply Shaken by Washington, D.C. Plane Crash.