"Did they cover any crashes from Russia?" he asked.
"Sure did. One was that 2008 Aeroflot crash in Perm, and of course the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv tragedy."
Ilya was thankful he was calling Svetlana over the phone, or else she would've noticed the immediate change in his demeanor.
Aside from his mother's death, nothing had shaken him to the core than the 2011 airplane crash that wiped out the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv hockey team. Like most sports-related air crashes, it had been a fairy-tale type story with a tragic turn: a promising team, on their way to (potentially) winning a major cup, all snuffed in seconds due to pilot error. And like all hockey-loving Russians, Ilya had wept while watching the memorials to the players who were killed - out of his father's sight, of course.
Like most Russians, Ilya had accepted airplane crashes as an inevitable part of Russia's race towards modernity and Westernization. Of course, to reach Canada, one has to fly, and Ilya had come to accept and believe that for all the delays, technical glitches and inconveniences he had to endure, the West had outpaced his home country in terms of air safety.
"How did they handle the Yaroslavl crash?" he now asked Svetlana.
"Purely technical," she replied. "They zeroed in on how the pilots were unqualified, and how they made a series of errors that doomed the team. But one thing's for sure: they didn't left out the human aspect of the tragedy. I guess that's why they wanted you to talk for the program."
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I don't go too much into Heated Rivalry fandom, but here's a work-in-progress of a crack idea that I had: after the near-tragedy at The Long Game, Ilya gets invited to talk about it for another Canadian documentary program. (I'm sure you'll guess quite quickly which program is that.)
