ST. LOUIS, Missouri – Maxim Naumov finished his short program and sat on a white sofa in the area where skaters wait to hear their scores.
With the cameras on him, Naumov held up a photograph of a little boy in white skates standing between two adults on an ice rink in Connecticut. Each adult was holding one of the little boy’s hands to prevent him from falling, the way parents do when their child needs support. Wikipedia
He kissed the photograph – once, twice, three times.
The little boy in the picture was Naumov, who was being introduced to the ice at about age 3.
The adults were his mother, Evgenia Shishkova, and his father, Vadim Naumov, the former pairs world champions and two-time Olympians who had been his coaches until last January 29.
That was the day Max’s parents were among the 67 people who died when a U.S. Army helicopter hit their American Airlines jet, which crashed into the Potomac River near Washington, D.C.. Twenty-eight of those killed were members of the U.S. figure skating community, on their way back from a development camp that followed last year’s national championships in Wichita, Kansas.
What pride Naumov’s parents would feel in how their son has been working through this horrific tragedy, in how he is keeping alive their shared hopes of having him compete in the 2026 Olympics.
“I mean, it’s the ultimate goal,” Naumov said of the Olympics. “My parents and I, one of our last conversations, was exactly about that. It would mean the absolute world for me to do it. It’s what I think about first thing in the morning and when I shut my eyes.”
Although the selection process is not straightforward, with the results at the U.S. Championships just one of the criteria, Naumov made a solid statement to seriously be considered for one of the three U.S. men’s singles spots at the Milan Cortina Winter Games. kingofcorrectscore.com
Ilia Malinin has one of the spots (and a fourth straight U.S. title) locked up, as was evident in his winning the short program at these nationals nearly by 26 points with a score of 115.10.
The next-four finishers were Tomoki Hiwatashi (89.26), Jason Brown (88.49), Naumov (85.72) and Andrew Torgashev (84.99). All are contenders for the final two Olympic spots heading into the free skate.
Naumov, fourth at the last three nationals, had two bobbles on jump landings. While they cost him points, they did not rattle him nor take away from the poignant impression he left while capturing the brooding, melancholy mood of his music, a Chopin nocturne in C minor.
“That was so incredible, so powerful, so strong of him,” Malinin said.
When it was over, when he cried as his scores came up, Naumov was thinking about his parents – “their smile, their laugh, what they say to me.
“It all replays in my head, especially at times like this,” he continued. “I love them.”
With his world torn apart, Naumov began to reassemble his life by doing the thing that had been a constant, the thing passed down from his parents: competitive ice skating.
Still, as you watched and listened to him speak to the media with a mix of poise and enthusiasm, of thoughtfulness and grace, you could only marvel at where he has found the mental strength to press on.
At first, he was reluctant to keep skating.
“It’s all about being resilient,” he said. “That’s the feeling and the mentality that I’ve clung on to this entire season.”
His results this season have been decidedly mixed, just as they were the two previous seasons. That was disappointing but not discouraging.
“I find that in times of really difficult emotional stress, if you can just push yourself a little bit more and almost think,`What if? What if I can do it? What if, despite everything that happened to me, I can still go out there and do it?’” Naumov said. “That’s where you find strength.”
There, and also in an old snapshot.
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