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Meet your neighbor
Area teen likely among state's only figure-skating champs

By M.V. Moorhead

Fees Middle School eighth grader Douglas Razzano has put Arizona—Tempe in particular—on the map in a sport not usually associated with our dusty corner of the planet: figure skating.

The 14 year old won a gold medal in the Southwest Pacific Figure Skating Regional Championships in October, beating out competition from Arizona, Nevada and the L.A. area. “From the research I’ve done, and talking to the coaches, I think it’s the first time a kid from Arizona has won  (in the men’s singles category) in about 15 years,” says young Razzano’s proud dad, also named Doug.

As a result of this win, Razzano the Younger is slated to compete in this year’s Junior Nationals in Lake Placid, N.Y., Dec. 9-15.

Skating has been the young Razzano’s passion since he watched the 1998 Olympics from Nagano.

“I just thought it looked like fun, and I wanted to do it,” says Razzano, who cites Alexei Yagudin as his favorite skater.

The sport hasn’t disappointed him, and at present he can think of nothing he’d rather do with his life than pursue it.

“I want to be a coach someday,” he says, “and my goal is to get to the Olympics. I like everything about it. It’s a rush.”

This aspiration means, of course, long hours at the Alltell Ice Den on Bell Road (also the training center for the Coyotes), under the coaching of Canadian two-time Olympian Doug Ladret.

It also means cash, a concern of Razzano the Elder.

“In our sport, funding is a big issue,” he says. “People don’t think of ice skating as an Arizona thing, just because of our geography; they think, ‘you’re the desert.’

“No one realizes that half the population comes from the Midwest, and the sheets of ice out here are booked until 2 a.m. with psychotic hockey players...unless you win something really big, everybody’s like ‘Yeah, sure, right.’”

He hopes his son’s accomplishment will call attention to this sponsorship opportunity: “We’re looking for exposure, and he’s not averse to wearing some corporation’s logo on the ice.”

Doug Jr.’s winning program in the Southwest Pacific Regionals featured music from Carmen, and, for his short program, he says, “I had a piece from ‘Mission Impossible 2.’”

He plans to use the same program for his Lake Placid appearance, which he says he views as his personal “mission possible.”

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