Alexei Urmanov - Career

Career

Urmanov was born in Leningrad, Soviet Union, and started skating at the age of four. Competed for the Soviet Union, he won the silver medal at the 1990 World Junior Championships. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Urmanov chose to compete for Russia. In 1991, at age 17, he became the first skater to perform a quadruple jump at the European Championships.

He competed at the 1992 Winter Olympics, where he placed 5th. He won the bronze medal at the 1993 World Championships. At the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, he won the gold medal.

Urmanov chose to remain in the competitive ranks. He became the 1997 European champion, but an injury forced him out of the 1997 World Championships after the short program and kept him from earning a trip to the 1998 Olympics. He retired from Olympic-eligible skating in 1999 and won the World Professional championships the same year.

Urmanov trained at the Yubileyny Sports Palace, which during the 1990s often had poor-quality ice and other problems, resulting in limited training time.

Urmanov is currently a skating coach and an International Skating Union technical specialist. He formerly coached Sergei Voronov and Nodari Maisuradze. His current students include Polina Agafonova, Gordei Gorshkov and Zhan Bush. He is based in Saint Petersburg, Russia but sometimes holds summer camps or clinics in other locations such as Luleå, Sweden and Paris, France.