After a tragic plane crash killed the entire US figure skating team, Peggy Fleming carried a nation’s hopes

By Emile Nuh, CNN

(CNN) — Watch the CNN Original Series “Decades in Sports,” which will be premiering on August 2 and available to stream on the CNN app the next day. Across six episodes, the series explores the defining moments, athletes and cultural shifts that shaped sports over the past six decades, from the television revolution and Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, right up to the impact of social media on today’s biggest sports stars.

Perhaps no athlete had a bigger impact on their sport than Peggy Fleming did for figure skating in the 1960s.

For any athlete, heading into an Olympic Games with the hopes of a nation on their shoulders is a heavy burden to carry. Add to that a devastating tragedy that takes the lives of almost all of their contemporaries, and it’s an entirely different proposition altogether.

This is the burden a 19-year-old Fleming had to carry heading into the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble.

Rewind seven years prior to February 14, 1961, and the US figure skating team was boarding Sabena Flight 548 from New York bound for Brussels, with their final destination being Prague, Czechoslovakia, where the World Figure Skating Championships were being held.

They were looking to defend the world title Carol Heiss had won for a fifth straight time a year prior, but tragically, the team never got the chance, as the Boeing 707 operating the flight crashed on approach to Brussels Airport and killed the entire US figure skating team.

The nation had just lost 18 of its most promising skaters, while 16 others, including family members, officials, judges and coaches – including Fleming’s own coach, Bill Kipp – all perished in the crash.

To this day, it remains one of the greatest tragedies in the nation’s sporting history. US figure skating was decimated overnight, and as USA Today sports columnist Christine Brennan highlights in the series: “All the young women who would have been the stars in ’62, ’63 and ’64 (were) gone.”

All of a sudden, the hopes of a nation lay on Fleming’s young shoulders, and as Brennan explains, “they rush her along quicker because there’s no one else,” adding, “she is the hope for the American future. The pressure was enormous.”

From tragedy to triumph

After the tragedy, attention quickly turns to how US figure skating would rebuild and maintain the dominance it enjoyed throughout the 1950s.

The program already had Fleming as a promising young talent, but many top US coaches – including Kipp – were all gone.

So a new wave of foreign coaches made their way across the Atlantic, most notably, Italian Carlo Fassi, a bronze medalist at the 1953 World Championships in Davos, Switzerland, who was now Fleming’s new coach.

As soon as Fassi came over to the US, Fleming’s “life is changed immeasurably,” says Brennan, who also goes on to highlight that the 1964 Winter Olympics came “way too soon” for Fleming, who competed at just 15.

However, after winning five straight national titles and back-to-back world titles on route to the 1968 Olympics, it was clear that Fleming was now the best figure skater in the world.

But the Games in Grenoble brought an entirely different degree of pressure for the 19 year old, as she was skating for an entire nation yearning to see the US reclaim gold on the world stage.

She was also doing it for the 18 skaters who were killed seven years earlier and never made it there, and for coach Kipp, who never lived to see what she became.

Everything Fleming had worked for since she was 12 had built up to this moment, and as Brennan says, “Peggy has said herself to me, ‘Every tiny muscle on your face is visible on the ice. There’s no helmet, there’s no big uniform, there’s no teammates – it’s you.’”

Despite all this, Fleming delivered on that special night in Grenoble and captured gold with a “grace and serenity that was almost goddess-like,” says Kathrine Switzer, the first official female entrant to the Boston Marathon.

Remarkably, it was the only gold medal the US took home from those Games.

Chartreuse dress dazzled tv screens

In the 1960’s, the advent of television had a massive effect on how people consumed sports. Athletes were no longer figures of our imagination, they could now be seen with our very own eyes.

The 1960 Olympics in Rome was the first to be broadcast widespread on television in the US, but as Brennan explains in the series, “By 1968, more and more Americans were getting color TV, and there were Americans tuning their television to the color of Peggy Fleming’s dress.

“This was a watershed moment in American cultural history,” she says.

Fleming later said that her mother chose the chartreuse dress for her after reading about the history of Grenoble, as she thought it would endear her to the French people. But it did much more, it captured the hearts of millions of people across the world.

US figure skating was on the verge of collapse after the tragic 1961 plane crash that wiped out its entire program – Peggy Fleming was the key figure who helped rebuild it in just seven short years.

Few athletes have been more transformative for their sport than Fleming was for US skating during the 1960s, and as Brennan highlights, “She dropped into American living rooms while literally rising from the ashes of one of the greatest tragedies in American sports history.

“It’s a story linked in tragedy, but it’s also a story of the ultimate triumph in sports.”

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