In recent decades, Finland has taken an ever-greater role in ice skating, hosting major events and fielding successful skaters. Kiira Korpi and Laura Lepisto won medals in women’s singles, Juulia Turkkila/Matthias Versluis are top ice dancers, and of course, Finnish synchronized skating teams have won nine World championships. But pairs skating has not been part of the Finnish success story–until now. Milania Vaananen, 20, is looking to change that.
Vaananen, a former singles skater, decided to try pairs at the end of 2018. She had extended tryouts with Australian pairs skaters Hector Giotopoulous-Moore and Harley Windsor before partnering full-time with Russian skater Mikhail Akulov. Vaananen/Akulov competed for Finland at the European Championships in 2022, but then split. Now, Vaananen has partnered with Filippo Clerici, 23. Clerici skated junior pairs for Italy and was at loose ends after his partnership with Alyssa Montan concluded. He seized the chance to restart his career by skating for Finland.
In their first full season in 2023-24, Vaananen/Clerici had immediate success. The duo won Golden Spin of Zagreb, a Challenger Series event, and were just off the podium at Finlandia Trophy, another Challenger. The team then placed 14th at Europeans and 18th at the 2024 World Championships in Montreal (where their goal was simply to qualify for the free skate). The future certainly looks bright for the young Finnish team. Vaananen/Clerici spoke with reporters at Worlds about how their partnership started and why they’re well-suited to each other.
Q: You’re quite a new team. Can you tell us how you paired up?
Clerici: So I did Junior Worlds for Italy two years ago. Then I wanted to stop skating, because I needed to go senior [due to] my age, and I had some problems with my partner. But I was happy about my career. So I said, ‘Okay, I’m going to stop skating,’ and I stopped for a couple of weeks. Then my coaches came in contact with Maurizio [Margaglio], who is the head coach for the ice dancers of the Finnish team. He was my first choreographer in singles, when he lived in Italy. They said, ‘We have a girl who’s searching for a partner.’ And I wanted to have a new experience out[side] of Italy. So we tried out, and here we are.
Q: Was there any thought of competing for Italy, instead of Finland?
Vaananen: I got asked, ‘Is it a problem if you compete for Italy?’ I said, of course, I need to think about it.
Clerici: My thought was to not compete for Italy, because there were already a lot of pairs for Italy. Competition would have been really high. And people didn’t really like me in Italy. So I wanted to get a new experience outside. That was my thing; I wanted to change it. That’s why I started with her, and not with another Italian girl.
Q: Did you have a conflict with the Italian federation?
Clerici: No, we never fought. I just think they didn’t like my skating ability in general. I mean, it’s normal … it’s a sport where we are judged, so it’s normal that you don’t like some people. Now, I have nothing against them. Probably, they have nothing against me. They just didn’t like me. I mean, I don’t hate them. I just didn’t feel their support, mainly. It’s not by all of them … I absolutely have great friends in the [Italian] federation. But with some others, they were always criticizing me a little bit too much. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s your opinion, I’ll just move on.’
Q: You’ve had a successful first season together, already winning a Challenger Series event at Golden Spin of Zagreb. What was that like?
Vaananen: Honestly, we didn’t aim to win it, but to be in the top three, yes. But we practiced a lot of programs [before]. We had time, and it was kind of my decision to go to [Zagreb]. I wanted to go to one [more] international competition before Europeans. And we worked hard, pretty much, and it went well.
Clerici: I think we have good potential. Of course, we are a new pair, so we don’t have the experience sometimes. We need [more] elements that we are able to do. So it can happen like at [2024] Europeans, where you do 20 points less than your best score. It’s part of being a new pair. But we have potential, because we know we can win, like with the Challenger Series, and we can compete at higher levels. And we are here [at 2024 Worlds], so that means a lot. It means we made a good choice [in teaming up].
Q: Why did you feel like you would be good partners together?
Vaananen: Because I think we are really different from each other. It’s not like we are bored with each other. We are completely different.
Clerici: We fight a lot.
Vaananen: He’s more the spicy one, the Italian personality. And I’m more calm and cool.
Clerici: I think some aspect of our characters helps the other. She’s really much more calm, as she said. So she calms down my Italian emotion, which sometimes comes out a lot. And I help her take things a little bit more serious, because she’s sometimes a bit too calm. So I think that’s the point, that our two characters balance the different aspects of the pair.
Vaananen: But we both are perfectionists, pretty much. That’s maybe the only one [area] where we are actually the same.
Q: You train with Ondrej Hotarek’s pairs group in Bergamo, Italy. What is that like?
Clerici: It’s always a good experience to train with good teams, because they help you go up. I used to train there, during all my experience in pairs. But when I was in juniors, we were skating a lot with new teams, and they were starting from zero. Now we are training with European champions and European medalists like Lucrezia Beccari/Matteo Guarise, Rebecca Ghilardi/Filippo Ambrosini, and Annika Hocke/Robert Kunkel. So that helps you grow a lot and is a good environment. We have the best coaches in the world at that school.
Q: Milania, is this your first time training out of Finland?
Vaananen: Actually, I never trained in Finland, except for singles. Before, I lived most of my time in Russia. I trained there because my mom is half-Russian/half-Ukrainian, and she wanted to have results. So I went there. I trained with [coach] Pavel Sliusarenko. I skated with junior and senior teams, like Karina Safina and Luka Berulava, when they skated together. But with the situation [Ukraine war], I decided to leave. It was too difficult. I’m happy that I made the change. It was difficult, of course, to get used to it, because in Russia, they were more strict. Here in Italy, they are more calm about training.
Q: What are your goals at this event [2024 Worlds]?
Clerici: We don’t have big goals, because we are a new team. A good goal would be to qualify for the free skating, because I think we would be the first Finnish team [to do so]. A competition is always a competition, you don’t know how it’s going to go. We just want to do our best, prove what we proved in Zagreb, and give a good example for the junior teams in Finland. It would be nice to start the culture of pairs in Finland, as my coach did for Italy. This first season was great for us.
Q: What was the best moment for you this season?
Vaananen: I think for me, Worlds is the best. And Golden Spin.
Clerici: For me, it was Finlandia Trophy. I didn’t expect the support we had in that competition [from the Finnish crowd]. That made me really feel like home and happy about it. That for sure was the best feeling I had. Then, of course at Europeans and our Grand Prix [Finland], and when we were on the podium in Zagreb. Those were all happy moments. But that one, for me, was the greatest emotion.
Q: It can be a long process to get Finnish citizenship. Are you thinking this Olympic cycle is in the cards, or are you thinking more long-term?
Clerici: I never think about long-term goals. I like to have small goals all the way through the process. But it’s not that hard. The problem is it’s a different language.
Vaananen: He speaks really good Finnish [already].
Clerici: I’m trying to learn. I can say some words now, some easy phrases. I start to understand. I’m not really far along … It’s much, much harder than other languages I’ve tried. For me, it’s a sign of respect. Even if I don’t go to the Olympics [for Finland], they believed in me. They’re supporting me in every part of my being an athlete. So I think it’s a sign of respect.
