More Power: The Story of Jurgen Grobler: The most successful Olympic coach of all time

THE AUTHORS have been rowing correspondents and commentators throughout Jurgen Grobler’s two lives. They met when Hugh Matheson was rowing in the national squad in the early 1970s and Chris Dodd was chasing the squad round the regatta circuit on behalf of the Guardian. In one capacity or another, they have witnessed all of Grobler’s World and Olympic performances. When Dodd’s Guardian colleague Charlie Burgess was appointed sports editor of the new Independent newspaper in 1986 and sought a rowing specialist, Dodd recommended Matheson who had recently retired as a competitor.

HUGH MATHESON’s rowing career began when he fell into the Thames, aged thirteen, alongside the rafts at Eton. He thrived on the challenge of rowing, loved the adrenalin of racing and was hooked. Ten years on he was rowing in the British coxed four at the Munich Olympics, off the pace and finishing tenth.

Following a silver medal in the Montreal Olympic Games and a year off adapting to an unexpected inheritance in Sherwood Forest, Matheson bought a single sculling boat and found that he preferred to be solely responsible for his failures and successes. Having no one else to blame and no one else to claim the glory was the drug, although it left few excuses for a lamentable sixth place after a boat-stopping entanglement with a lane marker in the final of the single sculls in the Moscow Olympics of 1980.

At the Atlanta Olympics ten years later, Matheson became a summariser for Eurosport, an all-sports subscription television channel. This is his first book.

CHRIS DODD has written about rowing in newspapers, magazines and books since the coming of Janoušek in 1970. His introduction to rowing was as a schoolboy cox at Clifton College, having no talent for cricket. He progressed to the stroke seat of his school’s second eight, a crew that satisfyingly beat the first eight in a challenge race at the end of the season. He stopped rowing after his first term at Nottingham University to edit the student newspaper, which led to a career on the Guardian in 1965.

As a Guardian staffer, his main job was layout, design and section editing in the features department, but he also worked on the sport and city pages. He began writing about rowing at weekends in 1970, covering Boat Races and Henley regattas. He covered his first world championships in 1974 to witness Matheson’s eight win a silver medal, and his first Olympics in 1984 to see Steve Redgrave launch his golden Olympic career in Los Angeles.

Dodd was the founding editor of Britain’s Regatta magazine and FISA’s World Rowing magazine.

In 1994 Dodd turned freelance when his off-the-wall scheme to set up the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames became a reality. He was responsible for creating the rowing collection and library and curating special exhibitions.

Dodd is a board member of the Friends of Rowing History and has contributed to history symposia at the River & Rowing Museum and Mystic Seaport. From 1994 he continued as rowing correspondent at the Guardian until moving to the Independent in 2004.

This is his tenth book (for book details see www.doddsworld.org)

BOOKS BY CHRISTOPHER DODD

Henley Royal Regatta (1981)

The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (1983)

Boating (1983)

The Story of World Rowing (1992)

Battle of the Blues (Ed, 2004)

Water Boiling Aft (2006)

Pieces of Eight (2012)

Bonnie Brave Boat Rowers (2014)

Unto the Tideway Born (2015)

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Christopher Dodd and Hugh Matheson 2018

Christopher Dodd and Hugh Matheson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008217815

For Bohumil ‘Bob’ Janoušek who changed the face of British rowing and put Britain’s oarsmen back on the medal podium during his tenure as chief coach from 1970–76.

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1 – The Munich Olympiad

Chapter 2 – The Montreal Olympiad

Chapter 3 – The Moscow Olympiad

Chapter 4 – East Berlin

Chapter 5 – Henley-on-Thames

Chapter 6 – The Barcelona Olympiad

Chapter 7 – The Atlanta Olympiad

Chapter 8 – The Sydney Olympiad

Chapter 9 – The Athens Olympiad

Chapter 10 – The Beijing Olympiad

Chapter 11 – The London Olympiad

Chapter 12 – The Rio Olympiad

Chapter 13 – Rodrigo de Freitas

Epilogue – Florida

Acknowledgements

Appendix 1 – The Stasi papers

Appendix 2 – Olympic Champions

Bibliography

Credits

Photo Section

Index

About the Publisher

Preface

‘Neil, you are a world champion. Now go and derig the boat.’

– JURGEN GROBLER

As More Power went to press, Jurgen Grobler was at the start of his eighth Olympiad as Britain’s chief rowing coach for men, the first year of the four-year cycle that began as the Olympic flame died in Rio’s stadium and will end four years later in Japan when he pilots a voyage to the Tokyo Olympics of 2020. In each of the previous seven Games, crews under his personal coaching have won gold medals, including two in Rio in 2016. At most of the world championships in non-Olympic years, his crews have also won gold medals. The pressure has never been greater for a man in his seventies who began his sensational run of successes in a previous life.

Grobler was brought up in Magdeburg, East Germany, studied at the hothouse of sporting achievement, Leipzig University, and produced Olympic golds in three Games for the country until the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, thawing the Cold War and leading to a new, united Germany. His forty-year Olympic career compares with no other in the history of sport.

From Munich when he was 26 to Rio when he was 70, his athletes have gathered medals on the podium while he has stood nearby with joy and fulfilment on his face. But behind the tears in his eyes, his next campaign is beginning to take shape.

For the few engaged in full-time sport to the millions who watch and dream, the prize-giving and medal-kissing rituals – ceremonies with oldies in blazers and the winners swollen with muscular pride – are as glamorous as anything offered in life. Those peaks are reached only by doing a life term in grim physical exhaustion inspired solely by fear of failure. That’s where Jurgen has lived six days a week for fifty years since the very beginning of his life in rowing at the German College of Physical Culture in Leipzig when he was preparing to climb the podium. Fifteen thousand days, perhaps, of anxiety and expertise, of working through simple solutions to complex problems, always alert for weakness in his athletes and in himself.

His job has offered extreme stress every day since he left school, and the matrix of his economic, political and social life has been as crisis-ridden as anyone’s who has avoided living through a war. When he signed on to become a rowing coach in East Germany, it was an elite profession in a country which had chosen sport as its means of expression to avoid admitting that it was an expendable buffer of the Soviet Union, which in turn was suffering a bad reaction to the strain of its own contradictions.

He was one in a population of fifteen million, many of whom thought the grass was greener on the other side of the concrete wall that had been built ‘for the protection’ of the people, but where they were shot if they did not agree that they were happier where they were.

Countries like East Germany have always depended on State Security and on police, sometimes secret, sometimes public, but always brutal. Every citizen, Jurgen not excepted, has to determine the degree of collaboration he will offer to live the life that suits him and his family. There is discretion in each person’s decision: you can choose to help the state and thrive, or you can offer less and get back much less. No one could treat the GDR with lofty humour and get away with it. Even the elites of the communist party, the SED – the equivalents of Eton, Oxford and a Tory cabinet in Britain – could not crack a joke and survive.

When the GDR suddenly fell apart in 1989, choices had to be made and opportunities grasped. Jurgen brought his family to live in Henley-on-Thames when he was hired to coach the world’s best oarsmen of the time, Steve Redgrave and Matt Pinsent. By fate, luck or design, he exchanged the world’s richest but now defunct rowing country for one destined – with his significant help – to rise to the top of the performance table.

This is his story.

1

1972

The Munich Olympiad

‘Grobler understood that collaboration with the other key elements would bring the results the state required.’

– KLAUS FILTER

Three-quarters of the way through the final of the single-sculls event at the Munich Olympics in 1972, German political and sporting history was poised on the needle of a stopwatch. West German Udo Hild was holding bronze-medal place by 0.02 of a second ahead of the young, blond East German, Wolfgang Güldenpfennig. At the 1500-metre mark, with 500 metres of the 2000-metre course left to decide, the question was not only which German was the faster sculler, but also which half of the nation had chosen the right path to prosperity and prestige from the ruins of the Second World War. As it happened, Güldenpfennig, the scion of Magdeburg, powered on to take third place by nearly four seconds from the fading Hild.

This result was vindication for a training programme designed not only to place the Magdeburger ahead of the West German, but to put East Germany, at worst, third on the Olympic medal table behind the United States, the world’s richest nation with a population of 210 million, and the Soviet Union with 260 million people. East Germany at the time had sixteen million and a wealth ranking at least twenty years behind its western neighbour.

Güldenpfennig’s trainer was Jürgen Grobler, a 26-year-old assistant coach born and raised in Magdeburg. He had been a clever opportunist to identify Güldenpfennig and take him through national trials to the Olympic podium. He was an interpreter of a method and practice of rowing that informed the entire national effort, a practice that brought East Germany a harvest of sixty-six medals in 1972 – exactly two-thirds of the total won by the table-toppers, the Soviet Union. Grobler had a deeply researched and tested system on which to lean: East Germany’s thrust to pile up medals at the 1972 Games in Munich was a national one-party-state sponsored effort, aimed particularly at the hated Federal Republic where Munich was the capital of Bavaria.

East Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, grew out of the post-war Soviet occupation zone and derived its authority from the Socialist Unity Party, or SED, and its Politbüro. It began its life as a separate nation in the buffer zone between East and West during the Cold War in 1949, when Jürgen Grobler was a three-year-old growing up in Magdeburg, a town almost completely destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945. It controlled every aspect of his life for the next forty years until it crumbled after its border crossings were thrown open and its people tore down the hated Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Team GDR, as the state would have been branded in the twenty-first century, had done well in the XIX Olympiad held in Mexico City, where a new rowing course was built at Xochimilco at an altitude of 2200 metres above sea level. Mexico was the first Games in which the two Germanys fielded separate teams, and what distinguished East Germany from all its competitors was the analysis to which the Mexico experience was submitted. The training programmes used since Tokyo in 1964 and the benefits and hazards of altitude training in particular were reassessed ruthlessly, and the ‘right’ approach was hammered out at a conference hosted by Manfred Ewald, the president of the German Gymnastics and Sports Federation, the body created to lead the impoverished nation to prestige on the international stage. Sport was a branch, or at least the principal lever, of foreign policy in the Politbüro’s grand plan of 1959, and the Politbüro now had evidence that it was working. Rowing was established at all fifteen high-performance centres to give selected athletes the environment and support necessary to achieve the great things expected of them. The sportsclub at Magdeburg was in addition to the two nineteenth-century rowing clubs in the town that enjoyed good stretches of water on the Elbe for training and racing.

Ewald set the standard of achievement: ‘The objective in Munich can only be to defend the third position won in Mexico and thus to place ahead of West Germany.’ The federation decided that it should refine the number of disciplines in which East Germany could excel and concentrate the effort on eighteen summer sports. Among other excluded sports were basketball and modern pentathlon. In the case of basketball, there was no domestic league to match the Americans and, therefore, no realistic chance of a gold medal. As for modern pentathlon, one-fifth of the points come from a show-jumping competition on a horse picked at random from a paddock of similarly trained animals. Too much is left to chance for a state interested only in winning.

Rowing made the cut, and fifty million East German marks (£12 million at 1977 rates) was pushed into the 1972 Olympiad. By then rowing was a reliable source of medals, and Grobler, aged 23 in 1969 when the Munich plans were laid, was still studying sports science at Leipzig. When he graduated in 1970, he went straight into a post as assistant coach in his hometown.

Dr Peter Schwanitz, who describes himself as a biomechanics specialist, came to know Grobler at that time in Berlin when Schwanitz was demonstrating boat testing at a training programme for elite coaches. Dr Theo Koerner, the head trainer of the East German rowing association DRSV, led the programme and promoted Grobler, enabling him and Sportclub Magdeburg to prosper.

Schwanitz says of Grobler today that he ‘was always very interested in the science of training’, science which encompassed all the specialisms that constitute a full understanding of how a human can move a boat over the required 2000 metres. Whenever a coach deconstructs a race, he or she will look at the split times for each quarter of the course and measure how these vary from perfectly even splits. In Munich, Hild’s race showed 102 seconds for the first 500, 109.7 seconds for the second, 114 seconds for the third and, in spite of the need for a final sprint, 115 seconds for the last 500. Alongside him, Wolfgang Güldenpfennig began more slowly at 103 seconds and gave away a further second (or one boat length in a single scull) to 1000 metres in under 111 seconds. He pulled all of Hild’s lead back to draw level at the 1500-metre mark in 112 seconds and left him wallowing in his wake in fourth place by covering the last 500 in fewer than 109 seconds.

Seen from the grandstand, Güldenpfennig held on to a place in the middle of the pack of scullers from the start and then sculled at a more even pace for the next three-quarters of the race, clocking successively 110, 112, 108.67 seconds for each 500 metres. Hild was quicker to the first and second marks before going progressively more slowly over the second half. While far from perfect, Güldenpfennig was demonstrating the superb endurance and racing nous that marked all the great East German crews of that era, and it was Grobler who had developed that ability in his 20-year-old club mate.

Hild’s race pattern of a quick first half followed by a slow second was standard practice for western nations, and even for other Eastern European states where full-time training should have resulted in greater endurance. The gold-medal winner in Munich, the Russian Yury Malyshev, took eleven seconds longer over the second half. The silver medallist Alberto Demiddi from Argentina was just over ten seconds slower and Hild, as we have seen, was seventeen seconds slower. Güldenpfennig dropped only 7.5 seconds.

Güldenpfennig’s preparation brought him far closer than everyone else to the even-paced splits ideal, and his trainer could claim some of the credit. However, the same pattern becomes evident when analysis is applied to all the East German medal-winning crews in Munich. The Germans were doing something consistently and well. The training programme designed by Dr Koerner was applied across all the performance centres. So Grobler would have started with a paper in his hand that told him exactly how much work was to be done, and at what pace, in each of thirteen sessions a week. The key was to equip him to test his charge on a daily basis to measure improvement and detect overtraining before it became apparent to anyone, including the athlete.

The East German trainers employed the ‘super-compensation cycle’, which is now universal. The athlete is pushed harder and harder for about six weeks of continuous training with no respite and builds up ‘residual fatigue’ so that the recovery between sessions is compromised. Then, when the bottom has been reached and the standard measures are well off the pace, the trainer’s foot is lifted from the pedal and light work is allowed for a number of days. The leap in recovery is marked by sharply improved measurements and, if the system is applied properly, the athlete soon rises above his previous best. Once the improvement is secured, the cycle is repeated with another sustained period of increasingly hard work until the bottom of the graph is reached again and the pressure is relieved to allow another rise, to a new peak.

Some of the East Germans were light years ahead of every other nation in the application of science to measure improvement and to detect decline in the performance of an individual in otherwise full health. This is the application of good science that Schwanitz recognised in Grobler. It was a safeguard against overtraining, and sometimes a complete collapse, that can result when a trainer uses unsophisticated measures to assess how deeply the hard work part of the cycle has bitten into the athlete’s performance, or if he is insensitive to a change in demeanour. Klaus Filter – who, as the leader of the team that developed the GDR fleet of competition boats, knew all the coaches – says that some of the Navy and Army coaches would measure only the number of strokes to the minute and number of kilometres covered to decide that the training had been successful. It was Grobler’s job to ensure that Magdeburg athletes were trained better and more wisely in order to beat the Navy and Army clubs by applying his sophisticated knowledge acquired at the university in Leipzig.

The other ingredient of training athletes better than any rivals was provision of support to enable them to accept the punishing regime. They were offered better accommodation in the high-performance centres than they would ever be likely to find at home. Their diet was enhanced well above the norm – the standard training of an international rower requires consumption of about 6500 calories a day for a man, in the proportion 50 per cent carbohydrates, 30 per cent fats and 20 per cent protein. These amounts were made available in SC Magdeburg, where Jürgen Grobler worked, by two club cooks with no one else to cater for.

Additionally, the scientists searched for any other medical cushion that would enable the bodies they trained to absorb more work without breaking down. In 1962 the East German state pharmacological research and development enterprise, Jenapharm, had isolated an anabolic steroid that it called Oral Turinabol. It was made available for therapeutic use in 1965. Within a year, testing for its effectiveness and for the appropriate dosage for athletes had begun. Once it was approved by the medical team it was made available to the coaches. It was the coaches’ decision, not the medical team’s, to use it to assist athletes. Men and, more controversially, women were dosed in time for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Oral Turinabol – a synthetic version of testosterone, the hormone that is known to increase muscle mass and bone density – was the ‘little blue pill’ on the breakfast tray of all East Germans training in sports that require either explosive or endurance strength. The athletes had to be seen to take the pill by the coach. The pills could not be taken home or even out of the room because of the secrecy surrounding the whole programme. The pills were described as ‘support’ and the athletes were not told of their content. Indeed, most experiments involved a control group that took a blue placebo.

Güldenpfennig was in the programme and his training intensity would have taken account of the assistance given by the drug. Grobler understood – better than many of his less curious colleagues – what was in the blue pill and will have measured its benefit and reported his findings to the medical commission, run directly by Manfred Ewald, through the Sport Medical Service and its deputy director and chief physician. At the Mexico Olympics in 1968 when Grobler was still studying in Leipzig, testing of competitors for illegal doping was rudimentary and the list of banned substances was short and unsophisticated. Few were discovered to be abusing performance drugs, but the divisions of opinion around the ethical questions posed by their use were becoming clear. The rights and wrongs of this matter were the subject of every coaching and training conference.

Without doubt, the physiological effect of added testosterone and the methodology to establish the most beneficial dose will have been part of the curriculum that Grobler followed. The bulk of the research work at PhD level in the adaptation to sport of therapeutic drugs was carried out in the German College of Physical Culture in Leipzig. There, too, the research studied the damaging side effects and the point at which more damage than benefit was being felt, and when an athlete should be dropped from the programme.