VValentine’s Day 1961. To say goodbye, the entire team has gathered for one last photo on and on the stairs to the plane. You can see the anticipation in them. Especially the beaming Laurence Rochon Owen, the newly crowned “Ice Queen”, who has just made it to the title of “Sports Illustrated”. The magazine shows “America’s most exciting girl skater” in a red short dress and doing a sweeping pirouette. Not only Owen has the magazine in her luggage on this flight, as will be shown. Just two days earlier, the sixteen-year-old had become the North American champion, in a competition held every two years between the United States and Canada until 1971. At the end of January she had already become American figure skating champion in Colorado Springs. On the farewell picture, she is in the first row next to team captain Deane McMinn, who is holding a sign: “US Figure Skating Association”.
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The American national figure skating team is on its way to Prague for the World Championship, which is to take place from February 22nd to 27th. To the left of the gold hope Owen are her two national competitors, Stephanie Westerfeld and Rhode Lee Michelson, directly behind them the three best men’s individual runners in the United States, Douglas Ramsay, Gregory Kelley and Bradley Lord. At the bottom of the stairs you can see the older of the two Owen sisters, the 20-year-old pair skater Maribel Yerxa Owen, with her nine-year-old partner Dudley Shaw Richards. The ice dancers are also there, including American masters Diane Carol Sherbloom and Larry Pierce, almost at the top of the stairs.
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