The plane crash that killed the 1961 U.S. world championship figure skating team decimated families and the sport, but alongside grief came renewal.

The young people pose casually on the steps of the Boeing 707, their faces luminous with excitement, jitters, pride and adrenaline, brightened by the easy smiles of born performers. They are figure skaters, and they are going somewhere special, about to fly to Brussels en route to Prague for the 1961 world championships.

Some are experienced competitors, but many are untried. The trip gives them a jump start on a new four-year Olympic cycle, their first chance to demonstrate they are legitimate heirs to the dominant U.S. teams of the postwar era.

The photograph, taken at Idlewild Airport in New York City, is 50 years old now, its age betrayed by the model of the aircraft and the vintage clothing and hairstyles. It captures one of the last scenes before the team's course was irreversibly set. If only the skaters could be coaxed away from the plane's door and down the steps. If only they could be led across the damp tarmac to safety, to the rest of their lives.

Sabena Flight 548 crashed on the morning of Feb. 15, 1961, while attempting to land in Brussels, killing all 72 aboard -- 34 of them in the U.S. skating delegation -- and one farmer on the ground in the fields around Zaventem Airport.

An entire generation of athletes and teachers died, taking with them competitive promise and a huge reserve of institutional knowledge. No one knows how many medals the athletes would have won or how many more champions their coaches would have molded. Yet their influence on American figure skating still resonates.

The morning after

The mystery of what went wrong aboard Sabena Flight 548 began even before the plane crashed. The crew didn't communicate with ground control in the flight's final minutes, and, for some unknown reason the pilot retracted the plane's landing gear on his initial approach. One theory is that another aircraft was too close to the intended runway. After the aborted approach, the plane turned left and circled the airport three times, bucking and banking at an increasingly steep angle. Then it went vertical, spiraled downward and exploded on impact.

Passengers' bodies were found hunched over in the crash position. The destruction of life was complete, yet some possessions survived, including airline tickets, jackets with USA patches on them and a partially burned copy of that week's Sports Illustrated with 16-year-old U.S. ladies champion Laurence Owen, a passenger on the plane, beaming from the cover.

The Canadian skaters who landed in Prague the morning of the crash crumpled in horror and disbelief at the news -- some had planned to fly with their American friends.

In Rye, N.Y., 10-year-old Diana LeMaire woke at dawn to the unaccustomed sound of adults bustling around on the floor below. Confused, she came downstairs. Her mother sat her and her sister Dorinda down at the kitchen table and told them their handsome, gregarious father, skating judge Eddie LeMaire, and their energetic 13-year-old brother Dickie were dead.

"Some people never have a father or a brother,'' a composed Muriel LeMaire told her girls. "You at least had a father and a brother, even if it was for a short time.''

At Purdue University, Russell Pierce found out from a minister that his only brother, Larry, the national ice-dancing champion with partner Diane Sherbloom, had been killed.

"I was 18, and we were all invincible," Russell said. "It took months for me to realize this wasn't just another competition he hadn't come back from."

Newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy issued a statement expressing condolences. Czech organizers and other officials lobbied to go ahead with the world championship, but the International Skating Union overruled them and canceled the event.

Stunned friends and fellow athletes in the skating hotbeds of Boston, Colorado Springs, Colo., and Los Angeles attended multiple funerals in a week.

Identifying all the remains took more than a week, adding to the families' agony. After visiting the crash scene and the morgue, King Baudouin of Belgium donated oak caskets with the royal seal on one end to transport the bodies home.

Small shifts of fate had determined who went on the trip and who stayed home.

Future U.S. champion Lorraine Hanlon was among the junior skaters invited to accompany the team to Prague and skate in exhibitions afterward. She wanted to go, but the private school she attended threatened to expel her if she did. Coach Ron Ludington decided he couldn't afford the airfare to accompany his ice dancers Bob and Pat Dineen.

Four-time U.S. silver medalist Tim Brown became visibly ill during his free skate at the national championship in the thin air of Colorado Springs, his mouth hanging open in distress. He finished his program with split jumps that took him all the way out of the rink. The judges placed him third.

Brown was diagnosed with a heart ailment, and fourth-place finisher Doug Ramsay -- a pint-size dynamo from Detroit who defied physics by lingering in the air on his double axel and sometimes did the jump with his arms folded -- was invited to go to worlds in his place. Brown would later write to Ramsay's mother, apologizing for being alive.

Investigators from Belgium, the U.S. and an international oversight group combed evidence for months. The FBI probed possible terrorism. Rumors multiplied and spread. No cause was ever definitively established, although authorities eventually agreed the most plausible explanation was a mechanical failure.

U.S. figure skating executives issued a mandate that still stands: No team traveling to an international competition would ever fly together again.

Rebuilding and renewal

The crash of Sabena 548 was a very public event, but the news receded into the tumultuous 1960s. The sport, understandably, focused on retooling.

Within a week of the crash, U.S. skating officials established a memorial fund to honor the team and support the sport's depleted ranks. The skating community reacted with its instinctive show-must-go-on ethic. The Skating Club of Boston -- which lost 10 members in the crash -- held the first big event to benefit the fund, converting its annual Ice Chips show into a tribute.

A season later, some older skaters felt obligated to extend their careers. Barbara Roles, the 1960 Olympic bronze medalist, came back to win the 1962 ladies' title less than a year after having a child. At the same time, the progress of some younger skaters accelerated because of the vacuum above them. Twelve-year-old Scott Allen won the U.S. men's silver medal in 1962 while still decidedly a boy. Two years later, he was the only U.S. skater to medal at the Innsbruck Olympics, capturing the bronze the week he turned 15.

Some skating hubs reached out to other countries to replenish their staffs. At the Iceland rink in Paramount, Calif., the death of charismatic young coach Bill Kipp had left many students bereft, including a 12-year-old girl named Peggy Fleming. John Nicks, a British pairs skater who had won a world championship with his sister, arrived the next fall to replace him. It was a move that changed the course of his life and others.

Nicks, now 81 and still coaching, worked with Fleming and would later guide three U.S. pairs to the world championship podium: JoJo Starbuck and Kenneth Shelley, Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, and Jenni Meno and Todd Sand. His longtime pupil Sasha Cohen won Olympic silver in 2006.

Fleming, one of the first recipients of a Memorial Fund gift, used it to buy new skates. She would eventually move on to train under Italian émigré Carlo Fassi, who was recruited to succeed Edi Scholdan at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo. Fassi's later protégés included Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill and world champion Jill Trenary.

Figure skating in the U.S. wouldn't regain anything resembling its 1950s supremacy until the 1980s and '90s, but, in retrospect, it rebounded from the tragedy faster than might have seemed possible. American skaters won a world championship medal in every discipline -- ladies' and men's singles, pairs and dance -- in 1965, and were never shut out at an Olympics.

The raven-haired Fleming, with her dramatic gaze and flowing style, became a symbol of perseverance. She won three straight world championships beginning in 1966, the same year her father succumbed to a heart attack at age 41. Fleming's Olympic title in 1968 was the lone gold medal won by U.S. athletes in Grenoble, and her immense popularity after the Games set a template for decades of American ice queens to come.

Bridging the gap

Keeping the grainy black-and-white legacy vivid in a high-definition, full-color world has been a challenge, but some skaters have made it their business to understand it.

For an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the crash, Sarah Hughes, a few months from winning Olympic gold, prepared a program in honor of the '61 team. She began her number with school figures she had done as a child and skated to "You'll Never Walk Alone."

Held in Madison Square Garden in October 2001, the tribute was doubly somber because of the events of Sept. 11. Hughes felt nervous, not only because of the occasion but because she was tracing the figures with freestyle blades.

One top skater keenly aware of the crash's repercussions is 2010 Olympic gold medalist Evan Lysacek. His longtime coach, Frank Carroll, was a student of passenger Maribel Vinson Owen, the nine-time U.S. ladies' champion and 1932 Olympic bronze medalist who was both feared and revered as a coach, not least by the two daughters she molded into top competitors.

Lysacek's relationship with Carroll remained old-school and somewhat distant until the last two years they worked together, the skater said. "He was the boss, and I was afraid of him -- he spoke the word of God, and I listened," he said. "He would talk about the way [Owen] did things, why she did things the way she did and why I had to do them that way."

Carroll didn't swat Lysacek with a skate guard as Owen occasionally would, and he didn't order Lysacek to quit professional skating and go to law school, which Owen once did to Carroll. But Lysacek felt the wrath of the martinet by osmosis if he questioned Carroll's direction.

"'You're out of line,'" Lysacek recited, distilling his memory of Carroll's words in hundreds of training sessions. "'This is in your best interests. It doesn't benefit me. That's the way she did it, and I can't teach it any other way.'"

Lysacek said he didn't understand the depth of the connection until he was mature enough to contemplate what it would be like to lose Carroll, whom he considered a second father. That gave him a glimmer of what it must have been like for Carroll to lose Owen.

Funding dreams

The collective trauma of the crash was so searing that in some ways it has taken a half-century to process. Some found being involved with skating too painful. Some found their way back.

Eddie LeMaire's daughter, Diana LeMaire Squibb, stopped skating after the crash. When she was in her early 20s, a boyfriend started pestering her to get back on the ice. She got her mother's blessing first -- then started training six hours a day, six days a week. "I had to get it out of my system," Diana said. She took pleasure in every stroke, skating as fast as she once had when her father hoisted her on his shoulders and skimmed around the ice.

Diana followed her father into judging and used her maiden name as a middle name to honor him. During her 25-year-career, people recognized it and shared their stories about Eddie.

"I learned so much from them about Daddy, what an imp he was," she said. It has been harder sometimes to reconcile the loss of her ebullient older brother whose last words to her were a playful "See you, Squirt."

One of Diana's great comforts -- and that of many others who lost their loved ones in the crash -- is the legacy of the memorial fund established in honor of the 1961 team, which has grown and prospered.

The fund has provided a total of $10 million for skaters' athletic and educational expenses since its inception. This season, it disbursed about $300,000. The 2011 U.S. champions in all four disciplines have benefited from it at some point in their careers. So did coach Danny Ryan's grandson, Christopher Nolan, who kept competing while attending the University of Delaware.

Yet Carol Heiss Jenkins, the world and Olympic gold medalist who has coached in the Cleveland area for 33 years, sometimes worries that young skaters and coaches don't understand the history of the '61 team and its legacy. She tries to keep the link alive by telling stories.

Jenkins knew everyone on the plane. She roomed with Laurence Owen at the 1960 Olympics, and often recalls the way the spirited teenager coyly asked whether she planned to retire and give someone else a chance. "She was a lot of fun, full of life," Jenkins said. "There was a lot of heritage there with her mother, but it didn't seem to overwhelm her."

The veteran coach once shared practice sessions at her home club in New York with skating judge Harold Hartshorne and his wife, Louise, who died in the crash. Jenkins still wears a diamond skate pendant, converted to a pin, that the Hartshornes gave her after she retired.

Back then, few rinks maintained summer ice, so skaters from different parts of the country naturally met and mingled in those scattered outposts that did. Jenkins trained in East Lansing, Mich., with Ramsay and some of the Boston skaters.

"They say time heals, but it's still devastating," Jenkins said. "I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I think about it.

"They were going to be the stars -- this was their time. They all would have done well. It was a very talented team."

In January, the team finally received a dignified curtain call as all of its members were inducted into the U.S. Skating Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the national championships in Greensboro, N.C.

It was time to acknowledge that although the sport managed to rebuild, what the families lost was irreplaceable.

It was time to bring them together.

The return

When the relatives of the 1961 team members walked into the Greensboro Coliseum banquet room reserved for the Hall of Fame ceremony, they saw a row of engraved silver bowls lined up on the dais. Each represented a family forever altered by loss.

The inductees were introduced the way skaters are at competitions, by name and club. Most of the family members chose not to speak as applause washed over them, some of it coming from the only other people in the world who could understand.

Some were living tributes to the '61 team members. Bruce and Johanne Lord came with their son Bradley, named after Bruce's brother, the men's champion. Stephen Kelley, who lost his brother Gregory and sister Nathalie on the flight, was accompanied by his son Gregory, named for the silver medalist.

Dudley Richards Abbe played goalie for his high school hockey team and helped win two Maine state championships. Carrying his uncle's name "gave me drive," he said. "I figured, I'm not going to be an Olympian, but I could push a little harder in the weight room and be a little more dedicated."

Others came for those who couldn't.

Linda Michelson met Rhode Lee Michelson's only brother, Mike, five years after the crash. She pieced together a sense of the high-spirited California girl -- the '61 bronze medalist who was determined to compete in Prague despite a sore hip -- from her husband's stories. Mike's mother, Marty, was always more reticent to talk about her feelings.

After Marty Michelson died, Linda and Mike discovered among her belongings a hope chest they had had no idea existed. They lifted the lid and found a time capsule filled with layers of skating programs, photographs and articles about the crash. Rhode's belongings -- a felt record album cover, a burned chain and cross, her immunization papers and her Sabena ticket -- were still in the envelope they'd arrived in from the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. Along with it was a letter asking the family to pay for the postage.

Stunned, Linda dropped to her knees and wept. "I felt so connected to Mike's mother at that moment," she said. "It's one of the biggest regrets of my life that I never understood the depths of her despair." Linda lost her husband to a heart attack four years ago, and when she was invited to Greensboro, she initially declined, then changed her mind. "Nothing would have kept Mike away," she said.

Now 75, Susan Richards Abbe is a pragmatic woman who tends to say exactly what's on her mind. She has outlived her parents, both of her brothers and her husband. She walks with difficulty but still radiates an indomitable air. She doesn't seem like someone who would struggle with closure, but as the Hall of Fame ceremony approached, some old emotions stirred and swam to the surface.

She hadn't seen Fred Heller, the family friend, in almost 50 years. They had been back in touch, thanks to the author of a book about the 1961 team. They had exchanged e-mails and phone calls. Both worried they might be overwhelmed when they saw each other again.

The night before the induction ceremony, Susan walked into a hotel suite in Greensboro and Fred opened his arms. "My other brother," she said as she and Fred embraced, patting each other gently on the back as her children looked on, some wiping tears from their eyes. Susan and Fred marveled at the passage of time for a little while, then both announced they needed a drink.

Susan left her walker at her chair the next evening and strode purposefully up to the dais to accept the bowl engraved with Dudley's name. A gold bracelet dangling with charms -- her brother's skating medals -- chimed from her wrist.

The next morning, about to leave for home, Susan looked tired but content. "I feel," she said, "like I can finally put Dudley to rest."

Bonnie D. Ford covers Olympic sports for ESPN.com. She can be reached at bonniedford@aol.com.

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