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.

Competitive career

For the Soviet Union, Petrenko was the 1984 World Junior Champion and won the bronze medal at the 1988 Olympic Games. He then went on to win his first two European Championships in 1990 and 1991. 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. 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.

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 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 performance in the free skate pulled him up to a fourth-place finish. It is generally believed this performance would have won him his 2nd straight Olympic gold had he delivered a clean short program and skated in the final flight.

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.

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 (with her daughter, Daria Grinkova ), 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.

Programs

Season	Short program	Free skating	Exhibition
1993-1994	Toreador Song from Carmen	"La donna e mobile" from "Rigoletto," "Ah fors e lui" from "La Traviata,"	Baila Mi
1991-1992	Carmen	Raymond overture Le Cid ballet music Waltz op.64 No.2 I Vespi Siciliani overture	Let's Twist Again
1987-1988	Flames of Paris	Don Quixote	Ave Maria

Results

International
Event	1983-84	1984-85	1985-86	1986-87	1987-88	1988-89	1989-90	1990-91	1991-92	1992-93	1993-94
Olympics					3rd				1st		4th
Worlds		9th	5th	6th	3rd	6th	2nd	2nd	1st
Europeans		6th	4th	3rd	3rd		1st	1st	2nd		1st
Goodwill Games								2nd
Skate America		3rd	2nd				2nd	1st			1st
Skate Canada					3rd	2nd
Nations Cup							2nd				1st
NHK Trophy			3rd				1st	1st
Moscow News		3rd
St. Ivel		2nd
International: Junior
Junior Worlds	1st
National
Ukrainian Champ.											1st
Soviet Champ.	3rd		2nd	2nd	2nd		2nd	1st	3rd

[ Source: Wikipedia ]