By Gina Capellazzi, Team FSO website administrator
Photos by Robin Ritoss
Sitting in fifth place after the short program in the junior men’s event at the 2024 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Virginia-based skater Lucius Kazanecki bounced back in the free skate to win the junior men’s title. Now, the reigning U.S. junior champion is preparing to make his senior nationals debut at the 2025 U.S. Championships, which will take place Jan 21-26, 2025 in Wichita, Kansas.
The 16-year-old from Harding Township, New Jersey, started skating at a “very young age.” At first, Kazanecki said he started skating just for fun.
“When I started doing it more, I felt like I just didn’t find a reason to stop. I didn’t love it at first, I feel like I just didn’t find a reason to stop. I guess I feel like I just liked it more and more,” he recalled.
Kazanecki first started skating at Codey Arena in West Orange, New Jersey, with coaches Tatiana Mikhailova and Oleg Epstein. In 2017, he started working with Roman Serov in Hackensack, New Jersey. Nina Petrenko was added to Kazanecki’s coaching team in 2020. On the juvenile level, Kazanecki won the 2020 North Atlantic Regionals and 2020 Eastern Sectionals. For the 2021-2022 season, he competed on the novice level, where he won the U.S. Championships Series event in Norwood, Mass. and finished fourth in Leesburg, Va. Kazanecki moved up to junior the following season and competed in his first Junior Grand Prix event. He finished eighth at the Junior Grand Prix event in Courchevel. He then had a third place finish at the 2022 Novice and Junior Challenge in Lake Placid, which was a U.S. national qualifying series event, and then claimed the silver at the 2023 Eastern Sectionals to qualify for the 2023 U.S. Championships in San Jose, California. At his first U.S. Championships, Kazanecki finished 14th.
In the summer of 2023, Kazanecki and his family moved from their home in New Jersey to Bethesda, Maryland. The main reason for the move was for better training for Kazanecki’s siblings, Julius and Olimpia, who are speed skaters. Moving to the Virginia-DC-Maryland area allowed Kazanecki to start training in Reston, Va. with Tatiana Malinina and Roman Skorniakov, the coaches and parents of World champion Ilia Malinin. The duo also are the coaches for 2024 U.S. pewter medalist Sarah Everhardt.
“It’s very comfortable training with them,” Kazanecki said of his coaches. “It is not a super stressed and not a super pressured environment.”
Kazanecki said he does feel some tension being on the same ice as Malinin, who is continuing to define the technical boundaries of skating. Kazanecki said Malinin does watch his lessons, but really doesn’t give him any feedback or pointers.
In his first season in his new training environment and with his new coaching team, Kazanecki didn’t receive a Junior Grand Prix event. He competed in two National Qualifying Series events – the 97th Middle Atlantic Figure Skating Championships and the Boston Open, where he finished 4th and 2nd respectively. He became the Eastern Sectional Singles Final Junior Men’s Champion to punch his ticket to the 2024 U.S. Championships in Columbus, Ohio.
At the U.S. Championships in Columbus, Ohio, Kazanecki was in fifth place after the short program, about seven points out of first. In the free skate, Kazanecki successfully landed eight triple jumps to move up to win the junior men’s title. Before Nationals, Kazanecki did not have a triple Axel in his arsenal. He had learned the jump two and a half weeks before the event. In Columbus, he successfully landed the jump twice, once in the short program and once in the free skate.
“I was confident going into the junior Nationals,” Kazanecki recalled of the U.S. Championships last season. “I was fifth in the short, but I was like I can still win, I just got to skate clean and skate how I train. I was very happy (to win) because I don’t think I had any clean performances that season, so when I actually skated a clean free skate with a triple Axel, I was very happy.”
“Winning (the junior title), I was happy at first, but I feel like it puts a lot of pressure on me. Having a title over your head and going into competitions, I feel like it puts a lot of pressure and this expectation that since you are a national champion, you have to win at every turn, at every competition, especially when I skate junior,” he added.
While Kazanecki is too young to move up to the senior ranks internationally, he has moved up to seniors domestically following the 2023-2024 season. For his first senior season in the U.S., Kazanecki is skating to “Interstellar“ by Dorian Marko and Hans Zimmer as his short program.
“I really wanted to skate to “Interstellar.” I really like that music. I like the piano. I think I really love it,” Kazanecki shared of his short program, which was choreographed by Tommy Steenberg, a figure skating coach and choreographer, who was a ten-time U.S. national competitor (2001-2010) and 2008 Junior World competitor.
But Kazanecki’s free skate music didn’t come as easily as his short program.
“I struggled with my long program with picking music. I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to skate to. I kept swapping music. So I feel like “I Love You” [by Woodkid] was just a good, solid music (choice), not too risky. So we just chose that,” he explained of his free skate, which was also choreographed by Steenberg.
Looking back on the season thus far, Kazanecki said it has been an interesting one for him. In July, he competed at the 2024 Skate Milwaukee, host of the U.S. Junior Cup. The event served as a qualifying event of sorts for Junior Grand Prix assignments. Kazanecki finished in 5th place and did not receive any Junior Grand Prix assignments. At the end of July, he made his senior debut and competed at the national qualifying series event, Philadelphia Summer Classic, where he finished fourth. A week later, he competed at his first Challenger Series event, Cranberry Cup at the Skating Club of Boston. He finished 14th in the junior event. In September, he won the senior men’s event at the 98th Middle Atlantic Championships, a national qualifying series event. In November, Kazanecki returned to the Skating Club of Boston for the Eastern Sectional Singles Final. He won the silver medal in the senior men’s event to qualify for his first senior Nationals.
“It was a very slow season. It was just very up and down,” he explained of his season thus far. “I feel like I had a lot of stumbles in between each competition, like I struggled and got better, and then I’ll struggled. It was just very slow improvement throughout the season.”
Kazanecki admitted that he was glad that following the Eastern Sectionals, he had a little more than two months to prepare for his first senior Nationals. He explained he has been working on polishing his programs and that the quality of every element keeps improving with every practice. His goal for Nationals is to skate two clean programs and to leave a good first impression.
“It’s a big step up (to senior Nationals),” he told Figure Skaters Online Dec. 30. “I want to feel confident at Nationals. I’m not going to put the pressure on being on the podium. I just want to keep training and be in the best form possible going into Nationals.”
Other than the time difference between junior and senior programs, Kazanecki said the biggest difference, for him, in moving up to the senior ranks is competing among the skaters that he has heard about for years. Skaters such as Jason Brown, Camden Pulkinen and Andrew Torgashev.
“I feel like just skating in the same competition and competing against them for the first time is just very different from competing against friends that I’ve known for a long time on the junior and novice levels. I just know it is a very different atmosphere.”
Outside of skating, Kazanecki is a junior in high school and attends school in-person a few hours each day. He also does course work online. When it comes to what he plans to do after skating and high school, Kazanecki admits that he hasn’t given much thought about it.
“I feel like I’m scared of life after skating. I obviously want to get into college, but I haven’t even thought about it much,” Kazanecki said.
When not worrying about school and skating, Kazanecki has other interests like baking and hanging out with friends.
“I love baking and I like making food, but I also like playing video games in general,” he said. “I feel like just spending time with friends and just playing. It’s just such an important part of my life.”
