Ok. We know that the 1961 Olympics wasn't held because of the Plane Crash. I read in Frozen in Time though that there was also an Olympics in 1960. The year before. Can anyone please explain that? I thought the Olympics was supposed to be every 4 years. Was it different for Olympic Figure Skating back then? Thanks.

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FSWer

It was the 1961 World Figure Skating Championships that was canceled.

Oh. For some strange reason I always thought from the way it was written that they ment the Olympics. Unless I'm taking for granted that it was the Olympic Team.

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FSWer

Maybe the confusion is that the since 1961 World Team from the US was killed in the plane crash as they were going to Worlds that year and so the competition (Worlds) was cancelled AND it meant that these skaters would most likely have been eligible for the 1964 Olympics (or at least some of them would have qualified for the 1964 Olympics) - so the U.S. had to kind of "start over" bringing skaters up the ranks - as well as some other coaches, if that makes any sense.

So in 1964 Peggy Fleming was pretty new on the scene but still qualified for the Olympics. If say, Laurance Owen had not died in the crash it is quite possible that Peggy would not have gone to the Olympics that year - does this make sense?

the US had to work hard to re-build its entire skating program in the years after the crash because the skating community then was really really small and taking away that much talent in the crash was really hard on the whole system and it took a while to build it back up again. Not TOO long in that Peggy Fleming became Olympic Champion in 1968 and Tim Wood was the Olympic Silver medalist that same year and after that the U.S. somewhat dominated figure skating once again - Janet Lynn, Dorothy Hamill, etc., to what we have today...

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