It’s hardly spoken of anymore, but in 1961 the entire U.S. figure skating team was killed when the plane taking them to the world championships in Prague crashed in Belgium.In 1970, 37 players and five coaching staff from Marshall University’s football team died when their plane slammed into a hill just short of the West Virginia airport and exploded.The beloved Turin FC soccer squad, regarded as the best in the world at the time, was wiped out in 1949 when its plane flew into a hill on approach, minutes from the airfield.In 2016, most members of Brazil’s Chapecoense soccer team were killed when their flight crashed in Colombia.Most famously perhaps — because of the cannibalism forced upon survivors — was Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, carrying the country’s rugby union team and their families, which crashed in the remote Andes on Oct. 13, 1972. While 27 survived the accident, eight were killed in a subsequent avalanche that swept over the wreckage. Sixteen were eventually rescued — 72 days after the catastrophe.It’s a grim roll call of the dead, from the sports world, where extensive travel is an everyday necessity. The saving grace is that while the casualty list is long, dozens of such tragedies, it isn’t longer still, given all the miles traversed over the years, all the teams on the move, all the games in all the places.In the modern era, calamities are mostly attributable to doomed flights. In earlier times, though, there were multiple fatal misfortunes involving trains and buses. Over a century ago, 14 members of Purdue University’s football team were killed in a train collision.And now, 15 boys and men from the Humboldt Broncos whose lives were suddenly extinguished in Friday night’s tragedy on Hwy. 35 in Saskatchewan. Fourteen injured.Read more: ‘He was the type of person you’d want your own son to grow up to be,’ says grieving York University coach of former player kil ...
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