Chen Lu

Chinese skaters had first competed at the Olympic Winter Games at Lake Placid in 1980 but none had made any great impression at the top level until the emergence in the early 90s of Chen Lu.

From a sporting background, her father was involved in ice hockey whilst her mother competed in table tennis; she was born in the city of Changchun in Northeastern China. She won the first of her 10 Chinese national championships in 1989 shortly after her 13th birthday and went on to bronze medals at both the 1991 and 1992 World Junior Championships.

In the senior ranks she burst through to prominence at the Albertville Olympic Games where many thought she was unlucky to be placed only in sixth. A few weeks later she became the first Chinese skater to win a medal at the World Championship when she placed third in Oakland. Chen seemed to specialize in winning bronze at that time in her career as she repeated the feat at the 1993 World Championships and then at the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994. Like her World Championship bronze, her Olympic bronze was the first medal won by a Chinese skater at that level. Her final breakthrough occurred with a victory at the 1995 World Championship but her results soon began to tail off. She had a brief renaissance at the 1996 World Championship and placed second behind Michelle Kwan but injuries and a breakdown in the relationship between she and her coach combined to cause a loss of form. Having already indicated she would retire from the amateur ranks after the 1998 Winter Olympics she unexpectedly proved to be a major medal contender at Nagano. The judges were split three ways as far as the bronze medal position was concerned so Chen, despite being the consensus fourth place finisher, earned enough ordinals to win bronze ahead of the Russian pair of Irina Slutskaya and Mariya Butyrskaya who divided the judges’ opinion thoroughly enough to cost both the chance of the medal.

She then toured as a professional with “Stars on Ice” before settling back home in China with husband Dennis Petrov, the 1992 Olympic pairs silver medal winner. The couple run the World Ice Arena in Shenzhen.