A 23-year-old figure skater who lost both his mother and father in the mid-air disaster over the Potomac River revealed Thursday his ex-Olympian parents changed their flight at the last minute.
Maxim Naumov suffered heartbreaking loss on Jan. 29 when the American Airlines plane carrying his parents, coaches Evgenia Shishkova and Vadim Naumov, as well as 62 other passengers and crew, collided with a military chopper near Reagan National Airport.
The couple was initially supposed to catch a different flight returning from the US Figure Skating Championship and training camp in Wichita before opting to hop on the ill-fated American Airlines Flight 5342.
“My mom let me know that they’re switching flights and that if I could pick them up,” Maxim Naumov told Today host Craig Melvin Thursday.
“My mom always texts me and calls me as soon as they land.”
But he never got a call.
Instead, the grieving son can only hold onto the memories of his parents, including the last thing his mother said to him.
“It was actually my mom that called me, she said ‘Hey, I just want you to know that we love you and we’re proud of you,’” Maxim said in the emotional NBC interview. “It means everything to me.”
“I mean my whole life, a part of it was to make them proud.”
The elder Naumov and Shishkova, who were both born in Russia, were coaches with the Skating Club of Boston following an illustrious career that included the Olympics and winning the pairs title at the 1994 World Figure Skating Championships.
Maxim, an alternate for the US national team, was also in Wichita for the championship in January, but left days earlier.
He put on a moving performance in honor of his late parents earlier this month that ended with him dropping to his knees and weeping in front of 15,000 people.
“I skated truly like from my heart, genuinely,” he said, looking back on the moment. “I wasn’t thinking about the steps, I wasn’t thinking about the jumps or the spins or anything like that, just let my body go and I never felt that before.”
He remembered his parents as beautiful and incredibly kind.
“The only way out is through. There’s no other way,” Maxim said as he talked about the grief.
“There are no options but to keep going. I don’t have the strength or the passion or the drive, or the dedication of one person anymore. It’s three people.”
