A peerless coach from any age, or any sport
There is no other Olympic coach in any sport, from any nation, who can compete with Jurgen Grobler. Look at his results, year after year, and no one else comes close.
Alternatively, place him alongside the other giants of British sport: men such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Clive Woodward and Sir David Brailsford. They all achieved remarkable things, but to produce gold-medal boats, in every Games that Jurgen attended since the early 1970s, is just mind-boggling. He turned British rowing into a winning machine.
We will talk more about Jurgen the man in a minute. But first I must say that – apart from being saddened by his departure – I find the timing of it unusual. Yes, he is 74, and he told me on our first meeting in 1990 that he wanted to do three more Olympics, so you could say that this moment was overdue. But with a year to go until the rescheduled Tokyo Games?
That feels like a kick in the teeth for the athletes.
Now, it may be that British Rowing are just keeping their cards close to their chest. Maybe they have plans for a new structure in place, and we simply do not know about them. My worry, though, is that there has been too much change and instability of late. David Tanner’s departure as performance director at the end of 2017 was a surprise. Then Paul Thompson, head coach of the women, left a year later. Now it is Jurgen. At the best of times, he would be irreplaceable. In these circumstances, it is even harder.
There seems little chance of hiring a chief coach from outside before the end of this Olympic cycle. They are all tied up doing their day jobs.
When Paul left, responsibility for the women’s boats was piled on to Jurgen’s shoulders – a tough ask at this late stage of his career. Now what will happen? I hope that we are not going to return to the amateurish days of the 1970s and 1980s, when the sport was in turmoil on a day-to-day basis. Over the last 30 years, our greatest asset has been consistency. But now we are into the unknown.
As I said, it all began for me and Jurgen in 1990 when he came to Henley to interview to be chief coach of the Leander Club. And I was part of the panel. I was in two minds. His record was outstanding, but East German sport was a production line, whereas British rowing was far less organised, and I was not sure he would be able to cope. I need not have worried. Two years later he became chief coach of the British men’s rowing team. Now he sees Henley – and England – as his home.
Once Jurgen had the job, he soon decided that “I need to have a meeting with the sports minister”, so that he could reinvent our training regime. I told him that British sport did not work that way. We could decide those things for ourselves. And that’s how Jurgen’s programme began. Up until this point in my career, I had been used to very intense sessions, coming off the water so exhausted that I felt I could not manage another stroke. The normal procedure was to slop along, rowing any old how, and then turn it on for the set piece. With Jurgen, it was different.
We rowed further at lower intensity, focusing on the power and length of every single stroke.
At first, Jurgen did not speak much English. Matthew Pinsent and I were halfway through one of our early training sessions, turning the boat around in front of the Leander Club, when he mimicked putting his hand in the water as if it were a blade. “The catch, Jurgen?” said Matthew. “Ja, ja,” he replied. “The catch. Not so bad.”
Then he pretended to take his hand out of the water. “The finish, Jurgen?” “Ja, ja. The finish. Not so bad. Now go and do another lap.”
The technical chat was limited, but Jurgen made an important early change, switching us around so that Matthew was in the stroke seat. The way he sold that to me was clever. Matthew was at Oxford University, preparing for the Boat Race during that first winter, which left me to do a lot of training with Jurgen on my own. Because Matthew had not covered the same distance, Jurgen suggested that we needed to build him up, and that the best place for him to raise his level was the stroke seat.
I saw myself as the stroke of every boat I rowed in. But I could accept that change at that time for those reasons, theoretically for a short period of time. History shows that we never changed back! It was a diplomatic way of making a difficult switch.
Jurgen clearly saw more in Matthew in the stroke seat than he did in me. And it just underlined his quality as a coach. He was used to working with athletes who followed his every word without question. But here he was, subtly manipulating us into the right positions, while working in an unfamiliar language.
The rewards came at the Barcelona Olympics two years later. Matthew likes to tell the story of our pre-race meeting on the eve of the final. He was expecting Jurgen to say something special, to offer up the key to Olympic success. But there was nothing, or at least nothing different from usual. The next morning, we had a little pre-race paddle. Then a light jog. Then we carried the boat down to the water, with Jurgen at our side. Each time, Matthew was expecting this shiny nugget of insight, but it does not come.
Finally Jurgen pushed us off and we were sitting in the water, about to paddle away to the start-line. Now Jurgen looked at us and said, “Ja, ja. I think you will win.” As usual, he was right.
Funny thing about sports movies: the coach is always a gabbler. A purveyor of motivational chat, in the mould of Robin Williams’s schoolteacher from
Dead Poets Society. These characters make for dramatic scenes, shot with zooming close-ups and scored by uplifting strings.
And yet, the funny thing about real coaches – or at least the good ones – is that they rarely say anything at all.
Jurgen Grobler is a case in point. Now 74, he announced his retirement yesterday as head coach of British rowing. Nobody saw it coming, which was typical of the man. To say that Grobler is a natural poker player would be an understatement. He is a human monolith, Mount Rushmore made flesh. One popular point of comparison is Sir Alex Ferguson – partly because the two resemble each other physically. But this was more than a lookalike parade.
Ferguson and Grobler both governed in the style of a Victorian paterfamilias: broadly benevolent but remote and frightening at the same time. Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of them, not even Roy Keane. But when things went right, a compliment would trigger a wild endorphin rush. The fewer the words, the more weight they carry.
“He is definitely scary,” said the sculler Graeme Thomas, when asked about Grobler last year. “But not in a kicking-stuff-around-the-dressing-room sort of way. It’s more a presence. I’ve heard him raise his voice only half a dozen times and that’s normally when he is refereeing the football match we play on our training camp in Sierra Nevada.”
In their biography
authors Hugh Matheson and Christopher Dodd compared Grobler to a chess player whose strategies took four years to unfold. As with Garry Kasparov’s Sicilian Defence, no
Like a good parent, the goal for the world-class coach is to make himself redundant
one else could read his intentions at first. But once the medals had been delivered, it became evident that every detail had been carefully calculated to set up the boat combinations for later.
The charismatic coach, nestled in his cashmere V-neck, wants to be the star; the world-class coach prefers his athletes to take the lead. Again, like a good parent, the goal is to make himself redundant.
On a recent High Performance Podcast, former Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand said: “What was great about Sir Alex Ferguson is he allowed the leaders in the changing room to run that changing room. I could count on one hand the number of times he came into our changing room at the training ground.”
Let us add a third statue to this stony-faced group. On his appointment as England cricket coach in 1999, Duncan Fletcher inherited the team ranked last in Test cricket. And yet Fletcher developed a multitalented squad who went on to win the Ashes.
Here was a genius who hid behind dark glasses. As a reporter, you never wanted to see Fletcher coming down to the close-of-play press conference (we called them “Duncan days”) because he so rarely said anything quotable.
As a coach, though, his very reticence was his chief asset. “[Fletcher] remained detached and inscrutable,” wrote Rob Key in his autobiography Oi, Key. “To the point where his emotion wouldn’t change whether he won or lost. As far as Fletcher was concerned, the captain [first Nasser Hussain, then Michael Vaughan] was the point of communication.”
Following Grobler will be a horrible job, just as it was for David Moyes at United, and Peter Moores, the Duracell-bunny character who succeeded Fletcher. As Vaughan has since observed, Moores was of the “pep talk” school of coaching. But England’s experienced players saw him as an interfering pest, and his regime foundered. Outside the movies, this is a job for the strong, silent type.