Petrenko moved to the United States in 1994 with his family and associates, living first in Simbury, Connecticut, the site of an international skating center.

Petrenko was often sick as a young child, and doctors suggested to his parents that they put him in a sport in order to improve his strength and stamina.

[citation needed] At the age of nine, his talent was noticed by Ukrainian figure skating coach Galina Zmievskaya and she took him on as a pupil at Spartak in Odesa.

Expected to succeed to the position of top skater with the retirement of the Brians, Petrenko lost the Soviet Nationals to a resurgent Fadeev.

His triple axel-triple toe in both programs gained him scores over both Wylie and European Champion Petr Barna, in spite of the mistakes.

A month later Petrenko went to the 1992 World Championships and won the gold medal there, as well, earning two 6.0's for presentation in his free program and receiving first-place ranking from all nine judges.

It was widely expected that he, 1988 Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano and World Champion Kurt Browning would be the main challengers for medals.

His strong performance in the free skate pulled him up to a fourth-place finish, and might well have been enough to defend his title had he delivered a clean short program.

In 1992, Petrenko had convinced his coach Galina Zmievskaya to take in Oksana Baiul, a 14-year-old Ukrainian orphan who was talented in skating.

[citation needed] After the 1994 Winter Olympics, Petrenko and Nina, Zmievskaya, Baiul and Viktor's brother Vladimir all left Ukraine and moved to Simsbury, Connecticut, United States.

He invited celebrity friends from the international figure skating community to perform in order to raise public awareness and funds for the thousands of children still being affected by elevated radiation levels from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that had occurred in his Ukrainian homeland fifteen years earlier.

$108,000 was raised, and later that year was used to open The Viktor Petrenko Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Odesa, with state-of-the-art medical technology.

In January 2004, Petrenko was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence (DUI) after crashing his car into a utility pole in Connecticut and refusing to take a breathalyzer test.

[16] Petrenko, wife Nina and mother-in-law Zmievskaya left the International Skating Center of Connecticut in 2005 and moved to New Jersey, where they began coaching together at the Ice Vault Arena in Wayne.

[24] In 2022, amidst Russia's ongoing full scale invasion of Ukraine, Petrenko was fired from his post as vice president of the Ukrainian Figure Skating Federation (UFFK) and expelled from the organization for taking part in an event in Russia that was organized by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov's wife, Tatyana Navka.