For an eight-year-old figure skater, the DC plane crash means the loss of friends and beloved coach
Sienna Irena Piro needed a figure skating coach to give her a chance.
As a three-year-old, she tried out for several but was told she didn’t have elite talent.
That was until she met Inna Volyanskaya, a coach at the Ashburn Ice House in Ashburn, Virginia who competed for the pre-1991 Soviet Union and achieved international acclaim.
Sienna’s mother, Rachelle Chase Piro, had gotten Volyanskaya to agree to see her daughter through a friend but she was nervous about taking her to the rink. The then-seven-year-old was athletically behind other skaters her age and the coach was already working with several high-profile athletes.
Piro worried her daughter wouldn’t make the cut, she told The Independent in a phone call.
But Sienna excelled quickly after meeting Volyanskaya. During a trial week, she landed her first axel, a jump that typically takes skaters up to two years to execute. Piro was left in disbelief.
The mother wondered how her child, who had long struggled on the ice, was nailing the moves. When she asked her, Sienna said: “Because Inna believed in me.”
Volyanskaya, 59, was one of the 64 people on board American Eagle Flight 5342 when it collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter on its descent into Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia around 9pm Wednesday. There were no survivors.
The accident left the DC-area figure skating community heartbroken.
An estimated 14 people on the flight participated in the sport near the nation’s capital, many of them children and Sienna’s closest friends, including Everly and Alydia Livingston, 14 and 11, Franco Aparicio, 13, and Brielle Beyer, 12.
“We all dreamed of going to the Olympics,” Sienna told The Independent, describing her friends as “happy” and “nice.” On Friday, she went to the rink, where makeshift memorials and flowers had been left. She hugged and cried with fellow skaters. Together, they remembered those they had lost.
“I just wanted them to be there with me,” said Sienna of her friends on the flight. “But they weren’t there.”
Piro took Volyanskaya to the airport the day she left for Wichita, Kansas, where the National Development Camp, held in conjunction with the U.S. Figure Skating Championship, was taking place.
They treated each other like family, Piro said. The mother and daughter relocated to Virginia after Sienna’s trial so she could train with the coach.
