Chesapeake Open brings fresh hope — but also memories of figure skaters lost in D.C. crash

Last year, when Yulia “Julia” Kay arrived at Chesapeake Open, a competition run by the Baltimore Figure Skating Club, event Chair Judy Carrig greeted her at the registration desk. They’d been emailing back and forth, trying to figure out how Julia could watch as many of her kids’ events as possible. The Gardens Ice House in Laurel has two sheets of ice, and together her three skaters’ events totaled 10 appearances on the ice.

Julia’s son, 11 year-old Ilya “Sean” Kay, had been putting finishing touches on the Ten Fox and Hickory Hoedown, two pattern dances he’d perform with Angela Yang. Chesapeake Open would be the pair’s second competition together, but you wouldn’t know from how they skated.

They qualified for the U.S. Dance Final and were invited to the National Development Camp in January of this year — a chance for the rising stars to be nurtured by the best of the best. Julia accompanied her son to Wichita, Kansas, where he and Angela spent three days training after the U.S. National Championships.

On Jan. 29, Julia, Sean and Angela were killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 5342 over the Potomac River on their way back from Wichita. Angela’s mother, Zheheng “Lily” Li, and the team’s coach, Alexandr “Sasha” Kirsanov, were on the flight, too, among the 28 members of the figure skating community on board.

On Wednesday, the Baltimore FSC will kick off an Olympic season filled with high hopes for American figure skating by hosting Chesapeake Open, which will bring 427 skaters to the area. Most years, it is notable because skaters debut their new competitive programs before the official qualifying season begins in July. Two-time world champion and Olympic gold medal favorite Ilia Malinin debuted the programs that would earn him silver at the 2022 U.S. Championships, placing just behind Nathan Chen.

This year, a community still reeling from unthinkable tragedy will be focused on eight skaters who’ve competed in the event recently but won’t be there.

Alydia Livingston. Brielle Beyer. Cory Haynos. Edward Zhou. Everly Livingston. Franco Aparicio.

Angela Yang.

Sean Kay.

Eleven young skaters perished in the crash, delivering heartbreak in the midst of what should have been a historic span for U.S. figure skating.

I had flown from Wichita to DCA (bound, ultimately, for Baltimore, where I live and work) two days before Flight 5342 crashed. It had been surreal to see practices — and the development camp — at my childhood rink, where I worked as a volunteer. I lugged my skates to Wichita to squeeze in a single skating session and afterward flew back with my skates in a carry-on rolling bag, as I imagine many of the young skaters on Flight 5342 had done.

Jinna Han, a promising 13-year-old from Boston, misplaced a small, pink floral accessory bag full of lip balm, tissues and snacks on the last day. She’d also stashed her new figure skating stickers — the kids were trading them — in there, so her mother searched frantically for it.

A plan was hatched: The bag, when found, would be sent to Jinna’s home in Boston.

Jinna was tagged in social media posts the night of the crash. Her friends were trying to reach her, just as mine were doing. A friend was scrolling through confusing reports on a D.C. subreddit and texted to see if I’d made it back. “Something just happened with a flight from Wichita to DC.”

My heart lurched.

My sister Tara had taken the direct flight three weeks earlier with her baby, and still I’d tried to guilt her into a last-minute trip back to Wichita for nationals. I hate remembering this part because, had my cajoling worked, she would have taken the direct flight back to D.C. But maybe the Monday one. I can’t let myself imagine otherwise.

There’s a world in which I could have been on the Wednesday flight. I’d been skating at the Wichita Ice Center over the holidays when I was offered a chance to chaperone at the development camp, but I didn’t have the necessary coaching credentials. Otherwise, I might have jumped at the opportunity and departed along with the campers.

Instead, I stayed up late into the night, watching Instagram posts appear in which young skaters sought contact with rinkmates. I went to bed dreading the morning; I knew by then the loss would be certain. I woke to a barrage of texts, to which I responded with an affirming “I’m okay” as fast as I could.

But of course I knew I wasn’t, and wouldn’t be anytime soon. I reached out to skaters, coaches and the officials who make the sport I love work, and I listened to their stories. My heart broke so many times, including when I heard this: Today, Jinna’s bag sits on a memorial table at the Wichita Ice Center, surrounded by stuffies and flowers paying homage to her and the other kids who had their final skate at that rink.

Vitali Kay emphasized, in the wake of the death of his wife and son, the need to maintain normalcy for his other three kids.

So, while he once considered himself the family’s driver, now he does it all. His job in finance allows him to work remotely, and his employer knows that means he’s working from the ice rink. He’s still making sense of it as he prepares to take his other three children to Chesapeake Open.

“A lot of the work and effort and tears and sweat happens not on ice and far from ice altogether,” he said. “During late nights, early mornings. It’s hard to see this through the glamor and beauty that happens during three-minute programs. But it’s there and that’s what Julia was good at.”

Vitali and Julia grew up in Riga, Latvia, where they met in college. Once they finished school, they “had a choice,” Kay said. “Should we come and explore a new world or stick around an old one? Being travelers by passion, we came, and it was a great journey.”

This year, the Kay family will travel to Laurel by a school bus, which will become their home on the road.

“The school bus is just a means of transportation,” Kay said. “It’s a conversion. The challenge that I personally face is that I need to balance a full-time job with family responsibilities and full-time skating. The school bus was kind of an idea — it’s like an experiment because I couldn’t figure out any other way to do this. Julia’s brother came to visit from Latvia, and he’s a handyman, so he did all the construction work. So now it doesn’t have any seats; it has beds. It’s a school bus full of beds.”

Chesapeake Open will be the first competition for Kay’s youngest son, Stellan, 7. Skyler, 10, will compete in both partnered and solo dance, as he and Sean did last year. Samantha, 14, competed at nationals in solo dance last year but stepped away from the sport this spring. This year, she’ll set up at Chesapeake Open as a vendor, selling crocheted animals that can be thrown onto the ice for competitors.

Vitali, who had never skated before, took to the ice two months ago. “Stellan is my coach. He’s teaching me to skate,” he said. “But I’m not sure if it counts — I skate like twice a week,” he said.

That’s how often I skate, and I’m competing as an adult at Chesapeake Open, so I told Vitali that maybe I’d see him in the dance event next year.

“I knew nothing about ice dance — about figure skating altogether. I would not be able to distinguish a flip from a lutz — I have no clue what it is — but now I’m in a position where I have no choice. I have to know this,” Vitali said.

The skating community had little time to mourn. Jinna’s club hosted the World Figure Skating Championships at TD Garden in Boston. Remarkably, an American flag soared above the ice on three occasions. For the first time in history, Americans won gold in three of four skating disciplines, just a year out from the Winter Olympic Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.

On televisions across the country, the week marked a return to American might in figure skating. In TD Garden itself, the skating world tried to find a way to trudge forward.

I spend more time in rickety ice rinks than professional sports arenas, so I was stunned by the view when I climbed to a seat near the top of the near-empty arena. Volunteers scurried around the floor circling the rink, 700 of them, all coordinated by the Skating Club of Boston, which lost six members but nevertheless continued pressing toward its turn on the world stage.

“The events department had to keep going,” Rebecca Stump, the club’s coaching director, told me. “The work that had to be done to organize this never stopped.”

Nor did the trauma from the crash; recovery stretched on, delaying funerals.

“It just kept going on and on, and it was hard to bring it to closure, to move forward, to focus on something this big,” Stump said. “But you learn resiliency through figure skating.”

Wichita took on a new meaning after the crash; it no longer referred to a city but was shorthand for the tragedy that came after it. Ordinary moments from camp took on new resonance. On the last day, the young skaters performed an exercise to Beyoncé’s “Halo,” choreographed by Yebin Mok, who’d competed for Team USA in the early 2000s. Mok covered the ice with a sweeping lyricism, and the kids followed in her wake, ducklings in red team jackets emulating her skating skills.

The kids packed their skates and said goodbyes, knowing they’d see each other at competitions throughout the season.

“The rink was on its highest of highs,” Samantha Wells, the rink’s figure skating director, told me. “And then we woke up Thursday morning and saw the news.”

Skaters who’d performed well there were thrown from celebration into grieving. Even when they won events in Boston, they honored those who had perished. “Honestly, I feel like it’s really therapeutic to have this huge championship, where the whole skating world comes together,” Adam Rippon, 2018 Olympic team member, told me in Boston.

But the scars will last. I flew back from Wichita with a volunteer jacket and a souvenir hoodie, as if I needed material proof that Wichita had indeed hosted nationals. But now I can’t bring myself to wear the jacket or hoodie, especially not to Mount Pleasant, a rink whose tiny lobby holds a trophy case that highlights winners of Chesapeake Open. Everly, Cory, Edward — their names are all there, engraved on trophies honoring Chesapeake Open events.

Carrig is 13 — or maybe 15 — years into running Chesapeake Open. She can’t remember exactly, because her responsibilities accrued gradually until she found herself the competition chair. Kind of like her life as a skating mom. She enrolled her daughter Bridget for lessons in 1997, and her younger daughter, Lauren, followed soon after. She’s currently the president and treasurer of the club and the institutional memory of Chesapeake Open.

“The majority of skaters, coaches and parents on that flight attended Chesapeake Open for several years,” Carrig told me. “So I knew them as part of the skating family.”

This year, when she mans the registration table — where the likes of former Olympians Johnny Weir and Charlie White check in as coaches — she’ll feel the absence of the skaters, coaches and parents lost in the crash.

“I still haven’t fully processed it — I really haven’t,” Carrig said. “I think of [Julia] often and constantly see her smiling face.”

But of course she won’t stay at that registration table, much as she may want to be there to greet everyone. I’ve taken her spot for a few hours each of the last two years, even though I hadn’t signed up for the shift, anything to give Carrig a chance to be the dozen other places she needs to be. Her days at Chesapeake Open run 12 hours, and once she’s back at the hotel, she tends the hospitality room, set up for the 48 judges the club flies to town.

I’ll also be competing this week. I’m preparing to skate the Ten Fox, like Sean Kay was last year. I’ve been studying an annotated Xerox of the pattern. And I’ve been watching a video of Sean and Angela’s performance, something I couldn’t bring myself to do when their videos were everywhere in February.

The 11 year-olds are fast and sure-footed — everything I’m not. But they’re also wildly in love with being on the ice, and that’s a feeling I know. Vitali Kay is working hard to preserve that feeling for his children — taking up where Julia left off — with his bus full of beds and his trips onto the ice. Judy Carrig is making sure hundreds of skaters can hold on to it for another year, too.

A whole community is holding on — for those who can feel the ice still and those who will be remembered for their love of it.