True Dancing With the Stars fans will never forget the first professional dancer to walk away with the mirrorball trophy.
When the ABC reality show premiered in 2005, only six celebrities had the opportunity to compete in the ballroom.
After just six weeks, General Hospital star Kelly Monaco was crowned the winner with her professional partner, Alec Mazo.
Together, they beat out Trista Sutter, John O’Hurley, Joey McEntire, Rachel Hunter and Evander Holyfield, who was partnered with Alec’s wife, Edyta Śliwińska.
“Several producers contacted us in 2005, when they were looking for professionals to appear on a show,” Mazo recalled in a 2013 interview with Jake’s Takes. “I believe that the producers chose us due to our competitive results, how we looked, our personalities and to see if there was a match between a professional and a celebrity who they paired up with us.”
The producers certainly didn’t make a mistake when casting Mazo and Śliwińska.
The pair appeared on various seasons on and off throughout the years before Mazo said farewell to the show in 2009. Śliwińska, meanwhile, said goodbye after season 22 in 2016.
“We had 15 seasons between us and it was a great experience, but it became very repetitive,” Mazo shared. “We had done four tours of Dancing With the Stars and developed a pretty decent network of connections and we just figured out that by the end of the day, it did not matter if we did 15 or 20 seasons, we had to move on from [DWTS] one way or another. We had an opportunity to produce and that’s when we decided when it was time to leave.”
Although he found huge success in the ballroom, Mazo pivoted career paths and is now an investment portfolio manager, according to LinkedIn.
He has more than 14 years of investment experience and serves as a general partner at DGA Capital.
Fans hoping to follow his new reality via social media may be out of luck. Instead, Śliwińska shares more updates about her husband and their family, which includes two children: son Michael and daughter Leia.
“The person you marry is likely the most important decision you’ll ever make,” Śliwińska wrote via Instagram in April. “And you know you made the right choice, because your relationship gets better every single year❤️.”
While dancing will always be part of Mazo’s life, his wife may deserve a perfect 10 for how she described their current life away from the cameras.
“My daughter often asks me, ‘Mommy, what’s your favorite thing to do?’” Śliwińska recalled via Instagram in August. “It used to be dancing. But things change. … I still love dancing, but I love THIS more: spending time with the people I love and nature. And the combination of these two, hiking, skiing, going to the beach or horseback riding, is now my favorite thing.”
Dancing With the Stars airs on ABC Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
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