Rafael Arutyunyan
figure skating coach
Rafael Arutyunyan (Armenian: Ռաֆայել Հարությունյան, Harutyunyan; Russian: Рафаэль Владимирович Арутюнян; born July 5, 1957) is an Armenian-American figure skating coach. He has coached in Armenia, Russia and the United States.
Personal life
Arutyunyan was born on July 5, 1957, in Tbilisi, Georgian SSR, and studied in Yerevan, Armenian SSR at the Armenian State Institute of Physical Culture. Arutyunyan's mother brought him to an ice rink after watching figure skating on television; he was skating regularly in Tbilisi by the age of seven. He is married to a skating coach, Vera, and moved to the United States in 2000. They have a son – a pianist born in the mid-1980s, and a daughter, who is an artist. On July 23, 2019, Arutyunyan and his wife became U.S. citizens.
Coaching career
He coached young skaters in Yerevan from 1976. In the 1980–1981 season, one of his students, Saak Mkhitarian, became the Soviet junior champion and placed 6th at the World Junior Championships. Soviet officials then invited Arutyunyan to Moscow, where he worked on his teaching certification and became an assistant to Tatiana Tarasova.
“Rafael Arutyunyan” enters the record as figure skating coach. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rafael, Arutyunyan and figure can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rafael Arutyunyan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.