End of an era
Outpouring of support for fired rowing coach Mike Spracklen.
The silver medal, in the end, couldn’t save Mike Spracklen’s job. He says he never presumed it would.
When the legendary Olympic rowing coach was called to a meeting with his superiors on Monday, he said he was told his employment with Rowing Canada had been terminated immediately. Less than two months after coaching Canada’s men’s eight to a second-place finish in an emotional Olympic final, the terms of his severance would mean he’d be paid until the end of the calendar year. A dozen years and handful of Olympic medals since he began his most recent stint in Canada, Spracklen is a free agent at age 75.
“I was half expecting it. So I was prepared for it. But I was a little disappointed,” Spracklen said in an interview from his home near Victoria, B.C. “But that’s life. That’s a coach’s life. You get disappointed along the way, don’t you?
Spracklen said he had no plan to retire from the trade he has plied for three different countries at every non-boycotted Olympics since the 1976 Montreal Games. He said he and his wife would likely return to their home in their native England and ponder the future.
“I will carry on coaching, and will coach people that want me to coach them,” he said. “If Canada doesn’t want me, then other people will, I think. And if they don’t, that’s fine, too. I’m way past retire- ment. Rowing Canada feels that I won’t be able to help them with their new program. I’m happy to play along with that. It’s no skin off my nose.”
After Rowing Canada posted an announcement on its website on Tuesday that Spracklen would not be returning to the program for the coming season, the coach received an outpouring of support.
Silken Laumann, who won three Olympic medals under Spracklen’s tutelage, released a statement in which she questioned the wisdom of the decision.
“When I heard the news, I just started to cry; letting Mike go feels so wrong,” Laumann wrote.
Various members of the Olympic eight crew took to Twitter to express themselves.
“I hope I get to be a part of another one of Mike Spracklen’s crews in my life,” Conlin McCabe, one of crew members, wrote. Spracklen said he’d been receiving a steady stream of phone calls from athletes young and old. “If you’d been on this telephone, you’d have thought they’d written my obituary,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s very nice. The calls are very comforting ... It’s not been unpleasant at all.” The same could not be said for a turbulent lead-up to the London Olympics, when Spracklen publicly criticized an ongoing reorganization of Rowing Canada that saw his role diminished. Certainly there were many in rowing circles who saw the move as a step in the right direction. Scott Frandsen, who spent some six years training under Spracklen, praised the organization’s decision to cut ties with Spracklen on his blog. He wrote that Spracklen created “an adversarial environ- ment where everybody other than his chosen few was the enemy.” Spracklen, for his part, pinpointed Frandsen and Dave Calder — who teamed to represent Canada in the men’s pair in London — as the authors of his ouster. “That’s where the attack came from,” Spracklen said. The coach said Frandsen and Calder were bitter because they weren’t good enough to earn a seat in his marquee eight. “The guys that aren’t good enough to make the top boat, they complain. They say, ‘He cheats. He’s got favourites. He picks his friends and doesn’t pick me.’ I’ve lived with that all my life. But when the authority take up that side, that’s when it becomes unpleasant,” Spracklen said. After raising a considerable ruckus in the lead-up to London, Frandsen and Calder won an in- ternal battle to be freed from Spracklen’s shackles. Once in charge of all the heavyweight men’s boats, Spracklen was replaced by Terry Paul as coach of the smaller boats (essentially, every boat but the eight). After spending no end of pre-Olympic breath enthusing about Paul’s state-of-the-art training, Calder and Frandsen finished dead last in their Olympic final.
Brian Price, who won Olympic gold and silver as cox of the men’s eight in 2008 and 2012, respectively, called Spracklen’s departure “truly sad for rowing in Canada.
“This wouldn’t have been a problem if (Frandsen and Calder) just said, ‘We don’t want to be coached by Mike Spracklen’ . . . They didn’t want to be coached by Mike Spracklen. But they also didn’t want anyone else in Canada to be coached by him again. And that’s where it was wrong,” Price said. “We all put our hands up and said, ‘Hold on. We like being coached by Mike Spracklen.’”
Price said there’s buzz around the rowing community that New Zealand, which dominated the men’s small boats competition in London, is thinking of forming a men’s eight, in which case news of Spracklen’s availability will be of interest.
Spracklen, who said he had yet to explore his employment options, said he had plans to be on the water later this week. A crew of local high school boys had asked for his assistance in their training.
“It’s just being on the water and being with athletes and driving them and being part of the show. It’s what I like doing,” he said. “But I like doing it with people who want me to do it. I like doing it with people who welcome what I do. And then when people come along and argue and don’t want me, I don’t really want to be there.”