[1][6] At first, she found the training difficult (she was required to execute more than 1,000 kicks each day) and would call her mother regularly.
[7] Aged 16 at the time, she refused to leave the competition mat for over an hour after losing the semi-final match.
[1] Leading up to the Olympic Games that year, she won gold at the 2000 Asian Championships in Hong Kong.
[5][8] Chen won the gold medal in the women's +67 kg (heavyweight) competition at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, defeating Natalia Ivanova from Russia.
[8][10][11] Leading up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing, Chen won her division at the 2008 Asian Championships in Luoyang.
[10][13][14] At the quarter-finals of the women's heavyweight taekwondo competition at the 2008 Summer Olympics, Chen fought Sarah Stevenson from Great Britain and was declared the winner, but British officials protested.
[15][16] They claimed that the referees missed a scoring kick by Stevenson; subsequent examination of video footage showed this to be true.
[17] In the semi-final round, the British athlete lost to María del Rosario Espinoza (the eventual gold medallist), meaning that any opportunity for Chen to win a medal through repechage was gone.