Christina Carreira and Anthony Ponomarenko Led By Olympic Example

Anthony Ponomarenko's parents can't watch him skate live.
 
While both will wake up in the middle of the night to watch their son's performances overseas immediately after he and partner Christina Carreira are finished, they can't bring themselves to watch them as they're happening. Only after the score has been announced.
 
"It's nerves," Ponomarenko said with a smile. "My parents get very stressed."
 
In this way, his parents aren't much different than many others in the skating world. But in many other ways, they're in a class of their own. Exhibit A: the Olympic gold medals displayed in their apartment in Russia.
 
Anthony is the son of Marina Klimova and Sergei Ponomarenko, who, together, won three Olympic ice dance medals—bronze in 1984, silver in 1988 and gold in 1992—competing for the Soviet Union and Unified Team. Despite their success, the couple hesitated to let their son follow them onto the ice.
 
"Originally, my parents didn't want me to skate," Anthony said. "They were like, 'This is too dramatic a sport.' But then they took me to the ice one day and I liked it right away."
 
Well, maybe not quite right away: Ponomarenko doesn't remember his first time on the ice, but he's told that he cried a little bit beforehand. But as soon as he got on the ice, he was fine.
 
He worked for two or three years just learning how to skate, and when he showed enough improvement, his parents, who are now both ice dance coaches, put him in the same discipline.
 
"I fell in love with [ice] dance right away," Ponomarenko said. "I did freestyle at first, but I felt dance was really comfortable."
 
He certainly has the right bloodline for it.
 
Growing up, Klimova and the elder Ponomarenko would show their youngest son old videos of their performances—Anthony cites their '92 free dance as one of his favorites—as well as their medals. They also coached him until he was 12.
 
Their impact on his skating career didn't stop as he got older. Now 17 years old and skating with Carreira, Ponomarenko relies on his parents, who he calls his "background coaches," frequently, and still gets regular technical feedback from his father, who was a technical specialist. Advice also comes in the form of general wisdom from years at the top of the ice dancing world.
 
"I think the most important is that my mom tells me that Christina, my partner, is my best friend," Ponomarenko said. "Nobody else matters except her. We need to have the best friendship."
 
For her part, Carreira says that her favorite part of their partnership is the relationship they share.
 
"We're really good friends, and it's fun traveling the world with your best friend," she said.
 
The duo paired up in the spring of 2014 and has since won two World Junior Figure Skating Championships medals (bronze in 2017 and silver in 2018), silver at the 2017 Junior Grand Prix Final and its first junior national title at the 2018 U.S. Figure Skating Championships. This season, their first on the senior level, they've already won silver at the U.S. International Figure Skating Classic and bronze at Nebelhorn Trophy. They will make their senior Grand Prix debut this week at the Helsinki Grand Prix of Figure Skating from Nov. 2-4 in Helsinki, Finland.
 
Carreira and Ponomarenko met while skating with different partners and training with Igor Shpilband. When both of those partnerships ended at around the same time, the two had a tryout together.
 
Despite not knowing each other very well beforehand, Carreira was aware of Ponomarenko's Olympic pedigree.
 
"Oh, that I knew," she said, laughing. "I also saw him in Lake Placid a couple years back, and I think my mom told me that his parents were Olympic champions. I thought that was pretty cool."
 
Though his reputation precedes him, Ponomarenko is happy to forge his own path in a very competitive U.S. field.
 
"When I was young, my mom and dad told me, 'This is your own career. We're just proud of you no matter what,'" Ponomarenko said. "I'm just focusing on my own career without the background that I have."
 
Those words of support came back to give him a lift after a difficult moment at the 2018 World Junior Figure Skating Championships. Favorites to win gold, Carreira and Ponomarenko finished their short dance in sixth place after Ponomarenko fell during their twizzle sequence. His mother, who had traveled to support the Michigan-based team in Sofia, Bulgaria, found him afterwards.
 
"She said, 'Anthony, I love you no matter what,'" Ponomarenko said. "And that kind of motivated me to skate a free dance that I've done a lot."
 
The pair rebounded to finish with the silver medal.
 
Though Klimova was in the arena for the World Junior Championships, she was still too nervous to watch.
 
"My mom, she rarely comes to competitions, but when she does she leaves the arena and just listens to the music and the audience," Ponomarenko said with a laugh.
 
Poised to begin his first quadrennial at the senior level, Ponomarenko knows he won't be able to fully escape his family legacy. He regularly hears comparisons—most of them positive—and has seen side-by-side videos of himself doing the same compulsory dances as his parents.
 
But he doesn't really mind: "I love skating and they inspire me."