Chen Lu comes from an athletic family. Her father Xi Qin Chen was an ice hockey player , also played in the Chinese national team and later became an ice hockey coach. Her mother, Yan Chui, was a table tennis player .
Chen got her first ice skates as a present from her father. At the age of five she went to a sports school and trained there figure skating. Her first trainer was Li Mingzhu . In 1991 she played her first junior world championship as well as her first world championship among seniors. In the juniors she won bronze, which she repeated a year later. In 1992 she also won bronze in the seniors in Oakland behind the Americans Kristi Yamaguchi and Nancy Kerrigan . It was the first medal for China at world figure skating championships . She was sixth at the Albertville Olympics . In 1993 she won bronze again at the World Championships in Prague , this time behind the Ukrainian Oksana Bajul and the French Surya Bonaly . At her second Olympic Games in 1994 in Lillehammer , Chen Lu won the bronze medal behind Oksana Bajul and Nancy Kerrigan. This was also a first for China, because never before had the country won an Olympic medal in figure skating . After the resignation of Bajul and Kerrigan placed in front of her, Chen was considered the favorite for the subsequent World Cup . A fatigue fracture forced her to give up there. A year later the time had come in Birmingham, England, and Chen Lu became the first Chinese world champion in figure skating. Her freestyle, which she ran to the score for Bertolucci's The Last Emperor , contained five triple jumps. In 1996, Chen won the silver medal behind Michelle Kwan at the World Championships in Edmonton . In 1997, Chen was injured for a long time and could not qualify for the freestyle as 25th at the World Cup. She then changed coach, went to Liu Hongyun and also trained temporarily in the USA. There she worked with the choreographer Lea Ann Miller . Under the direction of the new coach, she won her second bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Nagano in 1998 and thanked her coach after the freestyle.
Following her amateur career, she went to the United States and lived in San Francisco . She became a figure skating professional, went to the ice revue and appeared in various show events. She published two autobiographical books entitled "Butterfly on Ice" and "The Illusions of a Butterfly". On July 7, 2005, Chen Lu married the 1992 Russian Olympic silver medalist in pair skating, Denis Petrov . With him she has a son and a daughter. You live in the People's Republic of China in Shenzhen near Hong Kong and run an ice skating school there.
Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Chen is the family name here, Lu is the first name.