Viktor Petrenko
Viktor Vasyliovych Petrenko is a Ukrainian former competitive figure skater who represented the Soviet Union, the Unified Team, and Ukraine during his career. He is the 1992 Olympic Champion for the Unified Team. Petrenko became the first flagbearer for Ukraine. Petrenko lives in the United States and works as an ISU Technical Specialist, tours professionally, and coaches figure skating.
Early life
Viktor was born in Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, the first of two sons born to engineers Tamara and Vasyl Petrenko. His younger brother Vladimir Petrenko was also a competitive skater and the 1986 World Junior champion. The Petrenko family spoke Russian which was dominant in Odessa, as well as a means of inter-ethnic communication throughout the USSR. Viktor Petrenko attended a Russian-speaking school where he chose to study English as a foreign language. Because Ukrainian was not used in his family or his school, he never learned to speak the native language of his own country fluently.Petrenko was often sick as a young child and doctors suggested to his parents that they put him in a sport in order to improve his strength and stamina, so when he was five years old, they took him to the local ice rink and started him in figure skating. At the age of nine, his talent was noticed by Ukrainian figure skating coach Galina Zmievskaya and she took him on as a pupil at Spartak in Odessa.
Career
Rising star 1984-1988
For the Soviet Union, Petrenko was the 1984 World Junior Champion. He won the bronze medal at the 1988 Olympic Games, became one of the youngest male figure skating Olympic medalists. He also won the bronze medal at the 1988 World Figure Skating Championships. The podium finish came as a surprise, because the 3 former World Champions Brian Orser, Brian Boitano, and Alexander Fadeev were expected to land on the podium, but capatilizing on disastrous short and long program by Fadeev, Petrenko skated well enough at the championships to earn the bronze.Disappointment 1989
Expected to take over as top skater with the retirement of the Brians, Petrenko first lost the Soviet Nationals to a resurgent Fadeev. At Worlds, a fall in the short program combined with a subpar long program left him off the podium, while upstart and his eventual career rival Kurt Browning won a surprising victory.Road to Albertville 1990-1991
He then went on to win his first two European Championships in 1990 and 1991. He was frustrated in his attempts at a World title though. He won the short program at both the 1990 and 1991 World Figure Skating Championships but mistakes in the long program dropped him to silver both times. The 1991 decision was particularly close as Petrenko skated a strong program, only stepping out of a triple loop, and omitting a planned triple axel-triple toe which he turned into a triple-double, but lost in a controversial 6-3 split when Browning unleashed a historic skate with 3 triple-triples, edging Petrenko based on the superior technical difficulty of the program.Olympic and World Champion 1992
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, athletes from former Soviet states went to the Olympics together for the last time in 1992 on a Unified Team. Petrenko competed for this Unified Team and with a free skate that was ranked above American Paul Wylie's by seven of the nine judges, he won the gold medal, the first ever for a singles skater from the former Soviet Union. His skate was not his best, and some contested his win, but the triple axel-triple toe in both programs kept him over both Wylie and European Champion Petr Barna, in spite of the mistakes. A month later he went to the 1992 World Championships and won the gold medal there, as well, earning two 6.0's for presentation in his free program and receiving first-place ranking from all nine judges. In doing so he finally defeated his arch nemesis Kurt Browning who took silver. He used the same free program for the 3rd straight year, the polish and familiarity showing in the artistic strength of the program.Professional career and reinstatement
Petrenko turned professional following his Olympic win, moving to Las Vegas, Nevada, but when the International Skating Union ruled that professionals could return to competitive status in 1993, he moved back to Odessa, Ukraine and began training for another Olympics. He defeated another returning great Brian Boitano to win Skate America with a commanding 8 triple long program. He won his third European Championships in January 1994, competing for the first time for the independent nation of Ukraine, and went on to represent his homeland at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, where it was widely expected that he, 1988 Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano and World Champion Kurt Browning would be the main challengers for medals. After the short program, Petrenko was in ninth place after stepping out of his triple axel and not completing the rotation on his triple lutz, and Boitano and Browning were in eighth and twelfth, respectively. His strong performance in the free skate pulled him up to a fourth-place finish, and might well have been enough to defend his title had he delivered a clean short program.He had many successes as a professional including winning the prestigious Challenge of Champions event which is considered the top professional event 3 times, but failed to win the other major professional event, the Landover World Professional Skating Championships, in fact never placing higher than 3rd.
Later life
In 1992, Petrenko convinced his coach Galina Zmievskaya to take in a 14-year-old Ukrainian orphan named Oksana Baiul and become both her guardian and coach, with Petrenko covering Baiul's expenses. With their guidance, Baiul went on to win the 1993 World Figure Skating Championship and the gold medal at the 1994 Olympic Games.He performed as the Scarecrow for the CBS television special The Wizard of Oz on Ice in 1996.
Petrenko married Zmievskaya's oldest daughter, Nina Milken, on 19 June 1992 and their daughter Victoria was born on 21 July 1997. After the 1994 Winter Olympics, Viktor, Nina, Zmievskaya, Baiul and Viktor's brother Vladimir all left Ukraine and moved to Simsbury, Connecticut, where Petrenko and Baiul were invited to train and Zmievskaya and Vladimir Petrenko joined the coaching staff at the new International Skating Center of Connecticut.
show in Buffalo, New York
In March 2001, Petrenko organized the Viktory for Kids ice show in Simsbury, Connecticut and invited his celebrity friends from the international figure skating community to perform in order to raise public awareness and funds for the thousands of children still being affected by elevated radiation levels from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that had occurred in his homeland of Ukrainian SSR fifteen years earlier. $108,000 was raised, and later that year was used to open The Viktor Petrenko Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Odessa, Ukraine with state-of-the-art medical technology. In October 2003, Petrenko organized a second "Viktory for Kids" show, this time in Danbury, Connecticut. In addition to Petrenko, the show included Olympic champions Ekaterina Gordeeva, Ilia Kulik, Evgeni Plushenko, Brian Boitano, and Oksana Kazakova / Artur Dimitriev.
In January 2004, Petrenko was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after crashing his car into a utility pole in Connecticut and refusing to take a breathalyzer test. His record was cleared after he completed an adult alcohol education program.
Petrenko, wife Nina and mother-in-law Zmievskaya left the International Skating Center of Connecticut in 2005 and moved to New Jersey, where they all began coaching together at the Ice Vault Arena in Wayne, New Jersey. They have coached American men's figure skater Johnny Weir since the summer of 2007 and they coached Swiss skater Stéphane Lambiel for several months until injury forced his retirement from competitive skating in October 2008.
Petrenko toured as a performing skater with the US company of Champions on Ice for a record twenty seasons, until COI went out of business after the 2007 season. He is an ISU Technical Specialist for Ukraine and was the Assistant Technical Specialist for the men's event at the 2006 Winter Olympics. In June 2008, he was elected to the Presidium of the Ukrainian Figure Skating Federation.