The Athletic has live coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics
MILAN — We. American figure skater Maxim Naumov spoke the word as though he was inviting everybody in the world who has ever faced personal tragedy to come stand with him.
Because that’s precisely what he was doing. For more than a year now, this 24-year-old product of the Skating Club of Boston has been consoled by thousands of supporters in the aftermath of losing his parents, Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, in the midair collision of American Airlines Flight 5342 and a United States Army helicopter over the Potomac River. Naumov has often spoken of the strength he’s derived from that support, all while channeling his parents in his quest to skate in the Olympics.
Which brings us to the Milano Ice Skating Arena, where on Tuesday night, Naumov delivered a short program that has qualified him to participate in the free skate. As he did during the U.S. Figure Skating Championships last month in St. Louis, he held a photo of his parents over his heart while waiting for his scores to be posted. And as he did in St. Louis, he described, with eloquent emotion, what it meant to have the spirit of his parents out there on the ice with him.
“I felt like almost a hand on my back, pushing me forward and just feeling my parents guiding me from one element to another and just kind of keeping me grounded,” Naumov said. “(It was) almost like a chess piece on a chess board, from one element to another. But unlike any other feeling I’ve ever felt before.”
Explaining the stillness he felt before he began his skate, Naumov said, “I think just feeling the presence of my parents. I felt it throughout the whole entire experience, from the six-minute warm-up on the ice, just the calmness and stillness. I felt it through my whole body.
“When I hit my first position before the music starts, usually I’m like this a little …,” he said, pausing for a moment to add an amusing shaking of his body to make the point. He then continued: “And this time … in my mind I was able to calm myself. If you can keep your mind calm, then you can keep your body calm. That’s exactly what I felt.”
At the end of his skate, Naumov said, “It’s almost like I closed my eyes and I opened them again and I was on my knees and just looking up and saying, look what we just did.”
We.
Had he been ushered away by Olympics officials without saying another word, the assumption would have been that the “we” consisted of Naumov and his parents.
But something more was at play. For in using the Olympic stage to thank every last person who has supported him over the past year, Naumov has also graduated from the consoled to the consoler. There was a time when he needed everyone to have his back. Now he has your back.
“Tragedy and very difficult times will unfortunately happen to all of us at a certain moment in your life,” Naumov said. “I just hope that my story can empower or inspire somebody to continue to push themselves onward because that’s all we can do, it’s what we have to do.
“The only way out is through, and everyone has the ability to do that, to remain strong in your mind, to have will power, and do things out of love instead of fear,” Naumov continued. “I think if you’re able to do that, whatever it is that you’re going through, however big or small, you can have small wins every single day. And you can do things that you never thought that you could. So I hope that I can inspire people to do the things that they’ve always wanted to do.”
And then, summoning a slight smile, he added, “And to do the things they don’t want to do when they know that they need to.”
Naumov likes to point out that his mother was rarely a presence when he skated. “She never liked to watch me in person,” he said. “She would always be refreshing the scores thing, making sure she’s on top of it, nervous out of her mind but supporting me in her own way, always.”
His father, Naumov said, “… would have been right next to me, giving me a hug and saying, ‘I’m proud of you.’”
We’re left to imagine how proud Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova would have been had they been around to see their son emerge as a voice of calm and reason at these 2026 Games. After having had to deal with his own turmoil — he didn’t skate for months after his parents died — now Max Naumov is seeing what he can do about healing the world.
His words belong on a T-shirt. No … they belong on the side of a building.
“The only way out is through, and everyone has the ability do that, to remain strong in your mind, to have will power, and do things out of love instead of fear.”
In his own way, this kid has delivered gold.
