Disasters
Categories: Sports , Travel , Outdoors & Nature , Nonfiction
I didn't set out to write about plane disasters involving athletes, but I just sort of happened upon two new books on the subject this week.
The first is Nando Parrado's Miracle in the Andes. Nando Parrado, of course, is the hero of Piers Paul Read's 1974 Alive! which you've certainly read or heard about unless you are too young. Parrado was one of two Uruguayan rugby players who crossed some of the highest peaks of the Andes, 62 days after the team's small plane crashed. They hoped to reach rescuers in Chile, which they believed to be much closer to the crash site than it was. Of the 45 passengers and crew members, 15 survived.
Parrado's book is very much like Alive! He corrects minor errors. (some survivors for whom Read seems to show disdain were actually perfectly decent people). Parrado does not focus, as Read does, on the survivors' belief that their effort to remain alive by eating the bodies of deceased passengers was a kind of religious sacrament, like the holy communion.
Miracle in the Andes is particularly interesting because we learn what happened to the survivors after their rescue. All, now in their 50s, are well off and successful. Parrado is a motivational speaker, CEO of four companies, and married with two daughters.
Frozen in Time: the Enduring Legacy of the 1961 Figure Skating Team, by Nikki Nichols, herself a competitive figure skater, mostly tells the story of a rather friendly rivalry between two young women who hope to make the U.S. Olympic team. To earn a place on the team, they will have to place at the World Championships in Belgium.
Disaster strikes (yes, an even worse airplane crash) and the U.S. figure-skating team has to be rebuilt from scratch. The real heroine of the story is Peggy Fleming, whose arrival on the skating scene helped the team rebuild more quickly than anyone had imagined.
The best part of Frozen in Time is the author's insider's knowledge of the sport--for example that the "school figures" have been dropped from the Olympics because viewers found them boring to watch, and that ice dancing is much harder than it might appear to a non-skater. She recounts a time when a single axel was a major achievement for an elite woman skater; now, it's a triple axel. The improvement is largely due to better skates; the fact that skaters are now very slight and light may also have made a difference.
