TUNOSHNA, Russia — A Russian passenger airliner chartered by one of the country’s best-known hockey teams and carrying numerous veterans of the National Hockey League crashed during takeoff near the city of Yaroslavl on Wednesday, killing all but 2 of the 45 people on board.
The coach of the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv team, Brad McCrimmon, a Canadian who played 18 seasons in the N.H.L. between 1979 and 1997, died in the crash, along with Pavol Demitra, the captain of the Slovakian national team who played 16 seasons for the St. Louis Blues, Vancouver Canucks and three other N.H.L. teams. McCrimmon resigned as an assistant coach with the Detroit Red Wings last May to become Lokomotiv’s head coach. It was his first head coaching job in a professional league.
Beyond its impact on professional hockey, the crash added to a terrible run of air safety problems in Russia, with eight fatal crashes this year, six of them since June.
The disaster claimed the lives, as well, of Ruslan Salei, a 14-year N.H.L. veteran from Belarus; Karlis Skrastins, a Latvian who played 12 years in the N.H.L.; an assistant coach, Igor Korolev, a Russian who played 12 N.H.L. seasons; and Alexander Vasyunov, a Russian who played 18 games for the New Jersey Devils last season. Also among the dead were Aleksandr Karpovtsev, an assistant coach who played defense for the New York Rangers for five seasons, including 1994, when the team won the Stanley Cup, and the Swedish goalie Stefan Liv, who was on the Swedish national team that won the Olympic gold medal in 2006.
The only survivors were a crew member and a player, the star forward Aleksandr Galimov, who was taken to a local hospital, a Russian aviation official told the Interfax news agency.
“Though it occurred thousands of miles away from our home arenas, this tragedy represents a catastrophic loss to the hockey world,” Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the N.H.L., said in a statement from New York.
The tragedy brings to mind other catastrophes that have decimated sports programs. In 1961, the entire United States figure skating team was killed as it traveled to the world championships in Prague. All but a few of the members of the Marshall University football team were killed in a 1970 crash in West Virginia, the same year that a plane went down with about half of the Wichita State University football team (other team members were flying in a different plane). This crash is likely to have a severe impact on Russian hockey. Lokomotiv is a three-time Russian champion, winning its last title in 2003. It has been at the forefront of an effort to rebuild Russian hockey that started with the 2008 formation of the Kontinental Hockey League, or K.H.L. The team lost in Game 7 of the opening season’s playoff final and has been a top contender since. Billionaire businessmen and large state companies like Gazprom, the energy giant, have been pumping money into the league, improving arenas and raising salaries in an effort to retain players who were being lost to the N.H.L. and to recruit some North American and European stars as players and coaches. The crash is likely to give those stars second thoughts.
In 2008, a highly prized 19-year-old forward, Alexei Cherepanov, who was a first-round draft choice by the Rangers, died on the bench of the Avangard Omsk team at the end of a game of a heart ailment that had gone undetected. The team’s president and doctor weresuspended indefinitely by the league for their roles in the death, as well as for administering a banned performance-enhancing drug that was discovered at autopsy. In 1950, in the only accident in Russia comparable to the Lokomotiv crash, virtually the entire national hockey team died when its plane went down in a snowstorm as it approached the Sverdlovsk airport. The crash was covered up by the team’s manager, Vasiliy Stalin, the son of the dictator, who feared his father’s reaction. The younger Stalin immediately recruited a new team, and his father apparently never knew the difference.
The Lokomotiv hockey team was flying aboard a Yak-42 jet from its home in Yaroslavl, a city northeast of Moscow, to a game in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, in what would have been the second game of the Russian hockey season. It was airborne for only a few moments, roaring over a picturesque village of wooden homes and flower gardens before crashing to earth.
The Yak-42 plane is among the aging Soviet-designed narrow-body aircraft that have been the focus of safety concerns after a series of problems and crashes, including one in June that killed most of the 52 passengers on board. The hockey team’s plane came down about 500 yards from the runway in the village of Tunoshna shortly after 4 p.m. The fuselage came to rest partly in a tributary of the Volga River; it was unclear whether the pilot, having encountered an emergency during takeoff, had tried to ditch the plane in the water but struck the riverbank instead.
Three members of the Czech national team, Jan Marek, Karel Rachunek and Josef Vasicek, were also among the victims. Marek, a 2003 draft choice of the Rangers, led the Russian league in goal scoring in 2008-9, and Rachunek and Vasicek spent several seasons in the N.H.L.
A spokesman for Lokomotiv, Vladimir N. Malkov, said in a telephone interview, “We have no team any more; they all burned in the crash.”
Near the site of the crash, hockey fans streamed on foot down a village lane until they came to a police line that blocked any view of the divers who were retrieving remains from the river.
Young men in track suits struck the bells at the village’s whitewashed church over and over again. Yevgeny Bazurenko and three friends stood stone-faced, wrapped in red-white-and blue Lokomotiv scarves and jerseys.
“I don’t know whether they are going to build a new team, or who will be on it,” said Mr. Bazurenko, who is 16. “All I know is for the next five years, there will be no hockey in Yaroslavl.
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