After Maxim Naumov completed the greatest moment of his skating life, his short program at the Olympics on Tuesday, he went up into the stands of the Milano Ice Skating Arena and sat with the some of the people closest to him and watched the rest of the top skaters in the world compete.
Naumov’s entourage included his godmother, Gretta Bogdan, and his longtime friends, the Petrenko brothers, Daniel and Anton.
“I asked him ‘How did it feel?’ and he was so happy,” Daniel Petrenko told The Courant Thursday from Italy. “He didn’t feel nervous; he was excited. It was a goal for him to get here and now he’s just having fun.”
Daniel’s parents, Vladimir and Elena, are Naumov’s coaches.
“Being among the best skaters in the whole world, that’s something fun for him. After he skated and was watching the event, he was basically a fan. I was sitting in front of him and he was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s so good.’ He enjoys the sport so much.”
Naumov’s combined score of 85.65, good for a 14th-place finish, easily qualified him for Friday’s medal event, the free skate, which will take place at 1 p.m. (EST). Although winning a medal is likely out of reach, he will be the 11th to skate in the lineup of 24 of the world’s best, including teammate and gold medal favorite Ilia Malinin, the “Quad God.”
On Tuesday, Malinin, the two-time defending world champion, skated a near-flawless short program that resulted in a combined score of 108.16, more than five points ahead of Japan’s Yuma Kagiyama (103.07).
France’s Adam Siao Him is in third place (102.55), followed by Italy’s Daniel Grassl (93.46), Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov (92.94) and South Korea’s Junhwan Cha (92.72). The third member of the U.S. team, Andrew Torgashev, posted a short-program score of 88.94 and is in eighth place.
Daniel Petrenko, the director of figure skating at the International Skating Center of Connecticut in Simsbury, is in Italy with his fiancée and his brother to cheer on Naumov, who grew up with him in Simsbury.
Last July, Naumov, 24, asked Petrenko’s parents to coach him toward an Olympic berth after his parents were killed in the January plane crash in Washington, D.C., which took the lives of 65 others, including figure skaters, coaches and parents who were returning from the national championships.
Max’s parents, 1994 Olympic pairs skaters Vadim Naumov and Evgenia Shishkova, had coached at the International Skating Center. Their only son was born in Hartford and grew up skating in Simsbury before the family moved to Boston in 2017.
Daniel Petrenko said he has only seen his friend a few times because, like most of the other athletes, Max is staying in the Olympic Village.
“We’ve been trying to be respectful of his space; we all want to see him but we want to respect why he is here, too,” Daniel said.
They all had dinner Monday night, however, and peppered Naumov with questions about the Olympic experience.
“You’ve always dreamt of the Olympics so you kind of want to experience it and hear the perspectives from the skaters,” said Daniel, himself a former competitor on the national level. “To hear from Max, who is so close to me, it’s fun. We asked him, ‘How’s the Olympic Village, how’s the food?’ He showed us his pins.”
Daniel’s father, who continues to coach at the International Skating Center, is experiencing his first Olympics. He was an alternate in 1992 when his brother, Viktor, won the gold medal for the Unified Team; Vladimir never got to go to the Games.
“My dad is a man of few words so if I ask him, he’s like, ‘It’s good.’ He’s very nonchalant,” Daniel said. “But my parents are definitely having a blast. How could you not, to experience all this?”
It was Vadim and Evgenia’s dream that their son make it to the Olympics. Max held a picture of himself and his parents in the kiss-and-cry area after his skate Tuesday, just as he did at the national championships in St. Louis where he earned his Olympic berth.
But in the tragic aftermath of losing his parents, there are a those who have stepped in.
“Max’s godmother is essentially his second mother, and her husband is his godfather,” Daniel said. “She’s been there his entire life. She always talks about his parents and how it would have been nice (for them to be there).
“Monday, Max said it would have been nice for them to be here. With the picture he brought out afterwards and all of us keeping them in our hearts and our thoughts while we’re here is part of that. How could you not think about them when you’re here?
“My dad has played a role in helping him this year but obviously his parents helped him a lot – those were his coaches to begin with – and you can’t forget that.”
Meanwhile, teammate Malinin keeps teasing fans at the Olympics by submitting program plans that have the American figure skating star attempting the quad axel, a 4 1/2-revolution jump so difficult nobody but him has ever landed it in competition.
Yet through two programs in the gold medal-winning team event and his individual short program Tuesday night, he has yet to attempt the hardest quadruple jump of all, opting instead for the safer triple axel everyone else is doing.
“My lazy part of me,” Malinin said with a smirk, “just forgetting to change the planned elements.”
Or maybe he is saving it for his grand finale. His lead over Kagiyama and Siao Him Fa going into the free skate is a margin so big that it seems almost insurmountable, and one that gives him some wiggle room should he attempt the quad axel and fail.
The plan Malinin has submitted for Friday night includes it — naturally — part of what would be a record-tying seven quads in all.
“I’m hoping that I’ll feel good enough to do it,” Malinin said, more seriously. “But of course I always prioritize health and safety. So I really want to put myself in the right mindset where I’ll feel really confident to go into it”
Associated Press reports are included in this story.