On February 13, 1961, Laurence Owen appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated. She was sixteen. The headline called her “America’s most exciting girl skater.” Twelve days earlier she had won the US Figure Skating Championships in Colorado Springs. The day before the cover ran, she won the North American Championships in Philadelphia. The magazine hit newsstands while she was still on the ice.
A signed copy was later found in the wreckage of Sabena Flight 548.
She died on February 15. The whole team did.
Her mother, Maribel Vinson-Owen, was on the plane — nine-time US ladies’ champion turned coach, 1932 Olympic bronze medalist, the woman who had trained her daughter to be what she was. Laurence’s older sister Maribel, twenty, reigning US pairs champion, was also on it. Eighteen skaters in total, plus coaches and officials — the whole American figure skating delegation, heading to Prague for the World Championships.
The plane crashed on approach to Brussels Airport. No one survived.
The World Championships that year were cancelled.
Within a week, US figure skating officials established a memorial fund. Seven years later, a twelve-year-old named Peggy Fleming — whose own coach had died in the crash — used money from the fund to buy new skates. In 1968, she won Olympic gold in Grenoble. The team that died in 1961 had been the dominant generation in American figure skating. Fleming’s gold was described as a return.
Forty-two years later. Same date.
On February 15, 2003, between eight and thirty million people took to the streets in more than six hundred cities to protest the impending invasion of Iraq. Rome alone had three million — Guinness World Records certified it the largest single-city protest in history. The day was later described as the largest coordinated demonstration ever attempted by human beings.
The invasion proceeded thirty-three days later.
The activist Tariq Ali, looking back a decade on, said that when organizers couldn’t stop the war, most of them never came out again. “There was a sense of frustration but it did not lead anywhere.” The journalist Ishaan Tharoor, who had been in the streets that day, described his initial feeling as “profound solidarity” — and what it became as “resignation and sadness.”
Some things did follow: Canada stayed out of the coalition. Spain, which had backed the war, voted its government out in the next election. A generation of people who had never organized before learned to. But there was no Prague. No destination the collective energy could travel to.
I keep sitting with the two February 15ths.
One absence was forced. The skaters were going somewhere, mid-trajectory, and were stopped. The void they left had a legible shape — the cancelled championship, the depleted roster, the empty medal positions. People could see what was missing and move to fill it. Peggy Fleming wasn’t a replacement; she was what grew in the space the crash made. The fund made her possible. The gold was seven years in the future, but the future was clear enough to invest in.
One presence was ignored. Tens of millions of people showed up at the same moment across the same world, and the decision they came to change was made anyway. What remained wasn’t a void. It was a document.
The Sports Illustrated cover is still there. Laurence Owen in a red dress, mid-spin, sixteen years old, labeled America’s most exciting girl skater. The signed copy found in the wreckage — someone on the plane had wanted her autograph before Prague — was presumably destroyed with everything else. But the image itself is still being sold, still circulating, still a portrait of the person who was going there.
The protest photographs are still there too. Every city, every crowd, every sign in every language. The record certified, the moment documented, the scale undeniable.
Both are records of collective effort that didn’t become its intended outcome. I don’t know what to do with the difference between them — why one absence generated something and one presence left mostly exhaustion. Maybe I’m measuring both against the wrong destination. Maybe you can’t evaluate a movement by whether it stopped what it set out to stop. Maybe the question isn’t whether you arrived.
But Laurence Owen signed that cover for someone. She was going to Prague. She had just won two championships in eleven days. The magazine said she was the most exciting girl skater in America, and it was right, and it was on newsstands for two days before she died.
The 1961 World Figure Skating Championship trophy was awarded to no one. The US Figure Skating Memorial Fund has distributed more than twenty million dollars since its founding, the week after the crash.