Nine Years Ago Today

It's hard to believe that it's already been nine years since the tragedy that claimed the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team. When I heard it had been nine years, my jaw nearly hit the floor as it certainly doesn't feel like that much time has passed since that horrible news, but it did happen back on September 7, 2011 when the plane carrying the KHL club crashed. It was a rather brutal summer in 2011 with the news of Rick Rypien, Wade Belak, and Derek Boogaard already succumbing to mental illness, but this tragedy just made it a summer to forget altogether. Today, on this September 7, 2020, I look back on those who were lost in that accident.

From my article in 2011,

"Amongst those who perished in the accident were Lokomotiv head coach and former NHL defenceman Brad McCrimmon, Lokomotiv assistant coach and former Ranger and Stanley Cup champion Alexander Karpovtsev, and Lokomotiv assistant coach and former Winnipeg Jet Igor Korolev. Players who were lost in the accident include former NHLers Pavol Demitra, Josef Vasicek, Karel Rachunek, Karlis Skrastins, and Ruslan Salei. KHL stars like Stefan Liv and Jan Marek were also lost. 20 year-old Yuri Urychev was injured and not supposed to accompany the team to Minsk, but he wanted to cheer his teammates on. He also perished."

Consider the coaching talent alone - Brad McCrimmon, Alexander Karpovtsev, and Igor Korolev - for what they did in their hockey careers as players, and know that this was a massive loss. McCrimmon and Karpovtsev were Stanley Cup champions while Korolev won six Russian hockey championships - five with Dynamo Moscow and one with Metallurg Magnitogorsk. Karpovtsev also won a gold medal and a brozne medal at the IIHF World Hockey Championships while McCrimmon was named as the 1977-78 WHL Defenceman of the Year.

The names of the players who were still active is just as impressive. In terms of award winners, Josef Vasicek was a Stanley Cup winner, a World Junior Championship gold medalist, and a World Championship gold medalist. Pavol Demitra was a high-scoring winger who played in three NHL All-Star Games, led the 2010 Winter Olympics in scoring, and won the Lady Byng Award in 2000. Karel Rachunek won an IIHF World Championship gold medal in 2010 and a bronze medal in 2011.

Ruslan Salei didn't pick up a ton of personal accolades, but he once held the record for most games played by a Ducks defenceman at 594 regular season games, and he was actually traded for the next player in this list in 2008. That player was Karlis Skrastins, traded by Colorado to Florida for Salei, and he set the NHL mark for consecutive games played by a defenceman at 495 games, breaking the mark once held by Tim Horton at 486 games.

Stefan Liv was a highly-decorated player outside the NHL where he had earned a 2006 Olympic gold medal, a 2006 IIHF World Championship gold medal, a 2004 IIHF World Championship silver medal, and two IIHF World Championship bronze medals while tending nets for Sweden. He was named as the Swedish goaltender of the year in 2002 and Swedish player of the year in 2008. He also played in the 2011 KHL All-Star Game as a member of Sibir Novosibirsk.

Jan Marek was a teammate of Karel Rachunek on the Czech Republic squad that brought home the IIHF World Championship gold medal in 2010 and a bronze medal in 2011. He led the KHL in goals in 2008–09 with 35 in a season where he scored 71 points in 53 games with Metallurg Magnitogorsk.

The players, aside from those I pointed out above, who lost their lives that fateful day include Vitaly Anikeyenko, Mikhail Balandin, Gennady Churilov, Robert Dietrich, Alexander Galimov, Marat Kalimulin, Alexander Kalyanin, Andrei Kiryukhin, Nikita Klyukin, Sergei Ostapchuk, Maxim Shuvalov, Pavel Snurnitsyn, Daniil Sobchenko, Ivan Tkachenko, Pavel Trakhanov, Yuri Urychev, Alexander Vasyunov, Alexander Vyukhin, and Artem Yarchuk.

The eight-member crew saw one lone survivor as flight mechanic Alexander Sizov survived the accident. The cause of the crash was determined as a combination of factors that included poor maintenance and pilot error, but those findings would do little to fix the holes left in so many lives caused by this tragedy.

Let's hope that something like this never happens again.

Until next time, raise your sticks high in memory of those involved in the Lokomotiv tragedy!