When a Russian Yak-42 passenger slammed into a riverbank just moments after takeoff on Wednesday, 36 members of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team were killed. Unfortunately, the tragedy is not the first of its kind to befall a sports team.
In past plane crashes involving sports teams, 75 Marshall University football players, coaches, fans and airplane crew died in Huntington, W.V., on Nov. 14, 1970, coming home from a game. Thirty-six of the dead were players and 5 were coaches.
Some 29 people were killed when a plane carrying the Uruguayan rugby club Old Christians crashed in the Andes in 1972, including five crew and some family members.
The entire 18-member U.S. figure skating team died in a crash en route to the 1961 world championships in Brussels, and 18 members of the Torino soccer team died near Turin, Italy, in a 1949 crash.
In 1993, another plane crash claimed 18 members of Zambia's national football team and five team officials in Libreville, Gabon.
A list of sports teams involved in fatal plane crashes:
- Feb. 6, 1958 -- English soccer champion Manchester United, eight members, in Munich.
- Aug. 14, 1958 -- Egyptian fencing team, six members, in the Atlantic Ocean.
- Oct. 10, 1960 -- Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo football team, 16 members, in Toledo, Ohio.
- April 3, 1961 -- Green Cross, eight members of the first-division Chilean soccer team, in the Las Lastimas Mountains.
- April 28, 1968 -- Lamar Tech track team, five members and the coach, in Beaumont, Texas.
- Sept. 26, 1969 -- Bolivian soccer team "The Strongest," coach Eustaquio Ortuno, 16 players and two staff members, near Viloco, Bolivia.
- Oct. 2, 1970 -- Wichita State football team, 14 players, in Colorado.
- Dec. 13, 1977 -- University of Evansville men's basketball coach Bobby Watson and 14 players, in Evansville, Ind.
- March 14, 1980 -- U.S. amateur boxing team, 14 members, in Warsaw, Poland.
- Nov. 25, 1985 -- Iowa State women's cross country team, coach Ron Renko, assistant coach Pat Moynihan, and team members Julie Rose, Susan Baxter and Sheryl Maahs, in Des Moines, Iowa.
- Dec. 8, 1987 -- Peruvian first-division soccer team Alianza Lima, coach Marcos Calderon and 16 players, in Lima, Peru.
- Jan. 27, 2001 -- Oklahoma State basketball players Dan Lawson and Nate Fleming, and six team staffers and broadcasters, in Byers, Colo.
- Sept. 7, 2011 -- Russian hockey team Lokomotiv, 27 players, two coaches and seven club officials, in Yaroslavl, Russia.
