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Cory Haynos was among several budding figure-skating stars who died in the plane crash near Reagan National Airport.
The trip to the U.S. Figure Skating national development camp in Wichita, Kan., started out as a young figure skater’s dream, and Cory Haynos, a teenager from Northern Virginia, was there to make a mark.
On Wednesday morning, after most of the 150 invited up-and-coming skaters had left and only the very top of the group — maybe 40-45 athletes — remained for a special training session, Haynos launched himself forward into the air. He rotated in a blur, once, twice and a third time, like a human gyroscope, before landing on one foot, elated.
He had done it. Haynos had landed a triple axel, one of skating’s hardest jumps. At the perfect time, too. He had landed his first clean one at the age of 16 in December, but this time the camp’s coaches, there to scout and nurture the nation’s future elite champions, saw him.
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“I’d been watching him work on it all week, just fighting to do it,” Mark Mitchell, one of U.S. Figure Skating’s coaches at the camp, said Thursday in a telephone interview. “So when I saw him, I just said, ‘Oh, my gosh! Cory just landed the triple axel!’ And he was so happy, just so happy.”
The “level of excitement was off the charts,” Mitchell said, at the camp held in the three days after the conclusion of the U.S. Figure Skating national championships on Sunday. That made Wednesday night’s news all that more gut-wrenching, he said.
