J
urgen Grobler, our coach
at British Rowing, has a
saying he employs every
time we win a
competition. “Losers,” he
tells us, “train harder.”
When you first hear it you think
it does not make any sense. Is he
saying failure is the best way to get
us to train harder? Does that mean
he wants us to lose? But then you
realise what he is on about:
complacency is the enemy of
competitiveness. Just because you
have won does not mean you can
ease off the training. His point is
victory should only make you work
even harder.
Jurgen knows what he is talking
about. He has coached a team to a
medal at every Olympics bar one
since 1972. And the only reason he
has not got a clean sweep is that
East Germany boycotted the 1984
Games. The last thing any of us
wants is to break that run. That
is why I am hoping I hear him
trot out his old “losers train
harder” line after the World
Championships in Linz, Austria,
that began at the weekend. Victory
would be the start of the process
that leads to Olympic gold.
I will be in the eight boat at Linz.
This is the first Olympic
qualification regatta; there are
places in the Games up for grabs. It
is a simple job we have: we must
qualify all the boats in every
discipline. That way Jurgen has a
chance to pick who he wants
where. The moment the Worlds
end there is a clean slate. I could be
in the four or the eight; that is his
tactical decision. But I will not be
in either if we do not qualify.
In the eights, the top five out of
the 10 nations competing will
qualify. So, having said qualifying
is the only thing that matters,
ultimately I will be disappointed if
we only make fifth. To use an
Olympic analogy, that would be the
equivalent of coming away with
bronze. So, the silver target is to get
on the podium in a medal position.
And the gold is to finish first.
I want gold. Every race counts
between now and Tokyo. Every
victory has a lasting effect. If you
lose, there is a lot of soul-searching.
But the more you win, the more
you are learning how to win, andthe more strain you are putting the
chasing group under.
We are in good shape to do it,
too. I am confidently optimistic.
We have just come back from a
fortnight’s speed camp in Portugal.
Before that, we were at altitude at
Lake Silvretta in Austria. Silvretta
holds a special place in British
rowing history, particularly for
Jurgen, who has been taking teams
there every year for 40 years. In
the eight, we had a good camp, we
put good miles under the belt. It
was brutal at times, you have to
tough it out. But it is when you are
tired, squeezing out the last drop,
that you learn a lot about yourself
and your team.
It is really difficult, though, to
compare this year with others and
know where you are on a
benchmark. I have never had two
years there the same. This year we
had to knuckle down. But I felt in
doing that there was a really good
harmony, it felt like we were
properly driving on. It allowed me
to appreciate how lucky I have
been. I was picked up through a
talent ID scheme in 2003 when I
was 15. Some guys from British
Rowing came to my school, I was
on my way to play football and wastold instead there was going to be a
special lesson for all the tall kids. I
did a test, and a couple of weeks
later, my parents got a call and my
dad said: “I’ve got some exciting
news about rowing.”
I was born and raised in
Surbiton, there was a plethora of
rowing clubs around me but until
then no one had said I would be
good at rowing, I was not even
aware the sport existed. So, when I
was out on the water in Silvretta, it
reminded me how fortunate I was.
I could have been ill that one day of
testing. If I had been, instead of
preparing for the World
Championships I would probably
now be a barber in my dad’s shop.
For me, it was a fairy tale.
These days, British Rowing’s
official analytics partner, SAS, has
put a data-driven project in place,
known as “athlete longitudinal
profiling”, which plots a young
person’s progression against the
data it has for people like me or
Helen Glover. It should mean it
gets a better understanding of
where prospects stand. And a
better understanding means less
talent will slip through the net.
That is for the future. For now,
my mind is on one thing: victory in
Linz. Losers may train harder, but I
have every intention of being a
winner.Coach’s record proves
he knows what he is
talking about when he
urges us to train harder
Last thing we want
is to end Jurgen’s
Olympic medal run
MOE
SBIHI
TEAM GB
ROWER
I want to win gold
in Linz. Every race
counts between
now and Tokyo
would not work. Or it would only
work for a moment.
“When I arrived in Britain I
found highly motivated athletes. In
the GDR everything was funded by
the government, but in those first
years after I came here I had big
respect for the British athletes
because some even took a loan to
row, to pay for a training camp, a
competition. That was different.”
The story of Grobler’s days
behind the Iron Curtain is nicely
told in a fascinating recent
biography: More Power. As
co-authors Hugh Matheson and
Christopher Dodd relate, Grobler
was one of the thousands of
informers listed on the Stasi’s
books, while he also worked within
a regime that dosed its athletes
with steroids – mainly Oral-
Turinabol – via a daily pill. He has
since said that, “I had to live with a
system that I knew was wrong”.
On a research visit to Grobler’s
native Magdeburg, the authors met
a bunch of veteran rowers who
remembered him as “a socially
adept, seemingly artless man who
... would abide by whatever
imperatives the world he lived in
required”. Matheson and Dodd add
that he was “ferociously ambitious
and soon acquired the nickname
‘Schweinsd---’ or ‘Piggyd---’, which
should be translated in an almost
admiring way like the British
would say ‘Goldenballs’. Sometimes
the nickname was adapted to
‘Schweine Schlau’ or ‘canny like a
pig’.”
After the Berlin Wall came down
in 1989, Grobler took a position at
the Leander Club, hosts of the
Henley Regatta. As moves go, this
really was “canny like a pig”.
Redgrave was already based at
Leander, and had formed an
emerging partnership with Oxford
University undergraduate Matthew
Pinsent. Physiologically, they were
arguably the two finest specimens
in the sport.
Grobler swapped the pair
around at once, asking Pinsent to
take the stroke seat. He also
enlisted an old ally from East
Germany, Klaus Filter, to produce a
customised boat that would
maximise the pair’s powerful but
rough-edged style. The ensuing
five-second victory at the
Barcelona Olympics was so
dominant that Grobler’s promotion
to the national head-coaching role
arrived three months later. He has
been the power behind British
rowing since: “a Roman emperor in
our sport”, as one insider puts it.
For the majority of his near
50-year career, Grobler has worked
for the pre-eminent rowing nation:
East Germany in the Seventies and
Eighties, followed by Great Britain
in the 21st Century. As Matheson
told The Telegraph: “His genius lies
in identifying the problem he faces- which, in the case of Redgrave
and Pinsent, was that they were
great athletes, but average rowers - and coming up with a solution.”
Thomas concurs. “Everyone sees
him as this big numbers man, but I
feel he is very emotional and more
touchy-feely than you would
actually expect. The immeasurable
skill of him as a coach is that he has
that sixth sense. Somebody might
be pulling good numbers, but he is
saying: ‘Who do I feel good about,
who’s got that racing instinct that
when it really comes down to it is
going to deliver the goods?’”
When I asked Grobler about the
importance of data, he replied that
“a good coach wouldn’t always
look in the book”. But that is the
way the sport is going. British
Rowing has engaged an analytical
company called SAS to develop
“athlete longitudinal profiling”. In
layman’s terms, this means
creating a trend line for the
training scores an aspiring
Olympian ought to deliver at each
stage of his or her development.
“We have a lot of tacit
knowledge,” said Brendan Purcell,
British Rowing’s performance
director. “What we want to do is to
discover the key steps that people
are taking as they come through.”
Sooner or later, Grobler will
retire, and take all that tacit
knowledge with him. But not,
Matheson argues, before another
golden triumph next summer.
“When the squad flopped at the
2017 World Championships, people
were saying, ‘The wheels have
come off, this is the end.’ I replied,
‘This is Jurgen!’ In every Olympic
cycle, we have seen overwhelming
problems at the beginning, and he
always finds a way of solving them.
“Yes, the wealth is thinly spread
this time, in terms of experienced
rowers,” Matheson added. “But I
would still bet my house on Jurgen
coming back from Tokyo with
another gold.”The Daily Telegraph Tuesday 27 August 2019 *** 17
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