Britain left rudderless after culture clash led to coach’s exit
➤ Jurgen Grobler’s departure last year is viewed by insiders as the catalyst for decline leading to yesterday’s internal discord
A bleak day of reverses and recriminations at the Sea Forest Waterway has ripped open the wounds afflicting British Rowing. Wounds that date back to Aug 21 last year, and the moment when Jurgen Grobler announced his shock departure as head coach.
How could the most successful coach in Olympic history have been allowed to walk away, only 11 months before Tokyo? The question looms all the larger after the men’s coxless four finished outside the medals yesterday, thus breaking a 21-year golden sequence.
Ostensibly, the reason for Grobler’s exit was a clash of dates. As he put it in March: “British Rowing said, ‘We want to start [preparing for] 2024, as a priority’. I said, ‘I can’t commit for four years’.” The only solution to this impasse was a parting of the ways. At 74, Grobler has grandchildren in Switzerland, and a wife – Angela – who has patiently waited for him to retire.
Yet many insiders believe that there was more to this story, even if British rowing is such a small world that few wanted to be identified by name. “The big picture is about a movement throughout British sport to consider the athletes’ human rights, if you like,” one former highprofile rower said yesterday. “Jurgen was seen as too old-school.”
No matter how Tokyo pans out, Grobler’s record of winning at least one gold at every Olympiad since 1976 will now remain intact. He and David Tanner, the former performance director, combined to create a conveyor belt of champions, peaking at London 2012 when Great Britain won four of the 14 finals.
“Jurgen and David never seemed to get on particularly well, but they clearly had an effective working relationship,” one athlete said.
They were also both tough taskmasters who expected to be obeyed without question. If you wanted to take a weekend off because your best mate was getting married, the answer tended to be a flat “No”.
Tanner retired at the end of 2017, to be replaced by Brendan Purcell – an experienced sports administrator and former elite canoeist who had represented Australia in his competitive days. Soon, there were new safeguarding measures at Caversham – the man-made lake near Reading that has been British Rowing’s base for the past 15 years. Athletes were offered more say in decision-making and given access to a support group of mentors, who were carefully kept independent from coaches and management.
Grobler supported these initiatives, while remaining pragmatic about what it took to succeed.
“You can have nice guys, fantastic atmosphere in the training, everyone loving each other and joking,” he told me two years ago. “But no results means no money!”
Some believe the slide in British Rowing’s performance is cultural, and reflects the shift away from a no-compromise approach. As one gold medallist from Rio put it: “When you see the coxless four just missing out, that is going to take years to get over. I would rather be torn apart by Jurgen in South Africa, with my crew-mates watching, than have a slightly easier journey to Tokyo, but then find that my tank was empty for those final strokes.”
Despite his intimidating aura, Grobler became a father figure to many of those he coached – especially multi-olympic champions such as Andrew Triggs Hodge, Pete Reed and Sir Steve Redgrave. In March, Row360 magazine asked him about the Zoom call in which he informed the rowers of his exit. “I had very good feedback from a lot of athletes,” Grobler replied. “There is still some contact more privately.”
His loyalty to his former charges is reflected in his reluctance to work with rival teams, despite approaches from France, among other nations.
Yet while Grobler has delivered extraordinary results, some feel that his very success has left British rowing stuck in a holding pattern, unable to move forward for fear of breaking the golden chain. After the London Games, the triple-olympic medallist Greg Searle gave The Telegraph an interview in which he asked why Grobler did not embrace technology in the same manner as cycling supremo Sir David Brailsford.
“Other sports – and our opposition – have moved with the times and embraced sports science in a way we haven’t,” Searle said yesterday. “When I went back for another Olympics in 2012, at the age of 39, I felt the system was the same as the one I had first found in 1991.”
A double Olympic medallist, now retired, also queried the narrative of Grobler’s departure leading directly to underperformance in Tokyo.
“The issue is that the team is historically weak,” he said. “We haven’t won gold at the World Championships since before Rio. That must be a first for a whole cycle since British rowing turned professional.
“Several young talents quit the sport after Rio,” continued the former rower, who highlighted the names of Constantine Louloudis, George Nash and Paul Bennett. “I don’t know how enjoyable they found the whole process. Caversham became a place of grinding fatigue and drudgery.
“It was a place where innovation went to die, a place where scientists with clipboards were collecting data on lactic thresholds, but Jurgen was selecting on instinct. When we went to Silvretta for our altitude training, we were still rolling out the same dusty weights he had used with the East German women’s team in 1972.”
While many feel that the past few days have demonstrated Grobler’s indispensability, there is also an argument that Tokyo has delivered a necessary shock, which will clear the board for a proper modernisation of British Rowing. Either way, this is a challenging time to be holding an oar.