THURSDAY 9 NOVEMBER 1989
‘Grobler was the most curious one who reads, listens and tries everything.’
– KLAUS FILTER
Jürgen Grobler’s status among the East German team coaches had risen because the crews he was responsible for performed well and his application of the methods and science of rowing and sculling was as good as anyone’s.
In the months after each Olympics the GDR trainers, medical researchers, boat-builders, biomechanics, dieticians – all the members of the Committee – wrote reviews of the training and results of the past four years and made their proposals for the next cycle to be presented and discussed in a grand wash-up meeting, usually held in the following January. It was at this meeting that the next batch of gold-medal times were predicted and the baseline set for the trainers to work from. In 1981 it was the route map from Moscow to Los Angeles, with three world championships as marker posts along the way.
The men’s and women’s teams were run separately, although they shared most of the facilities. Hans Eckstein took charge of the men’s team and Grobler became director of the women’s squad. Eckstein was six years older than Grobler and, like him, a graduate of the German College of Physical Culture in Leipzig. Unlike him, Eckstein was a two-time national champion in eights and fours. Grobler rowed competitively from the age of 16 up to the student championships, but his rowing had been subordinate to his teenage dream of becoming a cameraman, which was quelled when he realised that fewer than four film graduates were required each year in East Germany. But the GDR was offering hundreds of openings for graduates in sports science. Strategically wise even in his teens, Grobler responded to the laws of supply and demand in what was, nominally, a purely command economy when, aged 19, he enrolled at Leipzig.
Ten years after his graduation Grobler was one of the top two operating coaches under Dr Theo Koerner, the chief executive, whom he regarded as one of his greatest influences. The other was Eckstein who had been his instructor during teaching practice at SC Enheit Dresden. That Jürgen took the director role for the women’s squad is attributed by some to the canny ‘Schweine Schlau’ character that realised the probability of more international medals equalled the reward from a grateful state of a higher standard of living. He was expected to produce consistent success in the six Olympic events available. At the 1979 championships East German women had won three golds and three silvers, and at the 1980 Olympics one better with four golds, a silver and a bronze, so this was a daunting target and in his first season as director the team flopped, if only by its own dominant standards.
The 1981 world championships returned to the Oberschleißheim Olympic course near Munich, and the conditions were benign. The women’s medal yield dropped sharply to one gold by the coxless pair and three silvers. Two boats missed medals. With the huge number of athletes being given the best possible training to compete for seats, it was particularly galling that the eight finished fifth, just ahead of Great Britain who enjoyed no investment of any kind.
Jürgen applied the standard selection rule for sculling boats, allocating the winner of the trials to the single boat. Sylvia Schwabe won the 1981 trials and inherited the single-scull slot that had been graced for six seasons by Christine Scheiblich, who had won the first women’s Olympic sculling medal in 1976 and was unbeaten abroad until her triumph in Moscow. Meanwhile, expectations for Schwabe were high and disappointment deep when she was beaten into fourth by, among others, the British sculler Beryl Mitchell who – to add insult to injury – was a lightweight and would have been too short and slight to qualify as a top-tier athlete in the rigid East German system.
As director of women’s rowing, Grobler had no responsibility for any particular crew. He was, therefore, slightly distanced from the failure. A high proportion of the 1980 Moscow women’s team, having held off the selection challenge from below despite the large number of candidates, had then performed badly. Grobler’s disappointment will have lingered only a few hours before he subjected his programme to severe analysis. In such circumstances his conviction that quality of training matters more than quantity was developed. Crews from the West, who had perhaps learned to fear the East Germans and regard them as well-nigh unbeatable, would be amazed to watch them paddling light on the way back to the rafts after a warm-down. The boat would bang from side to side and the crew slide back and forth with no care for the movement of others. It was the opposite of teamwork. It was ragged, like an army that has thrown away its weapons. Most pressure work at less than race pace was sloppy and contradictory to the excellence of competitive performance. In the men’s squad some of the distance rowed served to keep the oarsmen tired and out of trouble rather than to go faster in races. They behaved as military conscripts behave: did what they were told without engagement or enthusiasm and let standards fall the moment authority is out of sight.
In contrast, western athletes were volunteers who had given up most of their free time and sacrificed earnings, comforts and a social life in order to compete. Their energy was spent to the point that they could not climb the stairs at night without concentrated effort. They could afford little more than a couple of hours’ training a day six days a week, and so coaches made their lives as easy as possible by looking for constant rhythm and unified movement. Western athletes thus felt almost insulted that the crews who had all the apparent advantages, handed to them by a political machine that yearned for success, could treat the enterprise with such disdain.
The East German women were never as bad in this respect as the men, but they still treated their boats and their kit as if it was someone else’s property in which they had no interest. Grobler wanted a shift of attitude and character, and gradually he obtained it. Rather than increase pressure on the West, and the Federal Republic in particular, Grobler looked east. After all, it was the Russians who had pushed his crews down the table. The Soviet Union had suffered insult in their 1980 ‘home Games’ in Moscow, where the gold medal score was four to one in East Germany’s favour, and so they had doubled their efforts, engaged in systematic doping of athletes, and used every advantage in a most cynical manner. At the 1981 championships, the Soviet Union took four of the six women’s golds to East Germany’s one, and in 1982 it was five to one. The Soviet Union was drawing on a population sixteen times greater and investing the equivalent of the GDR national programme in each of its satellite states.
The science was also, in effect, the property of the Soviet Union. When the German Democratic Republic was created out of the Soviet zone in 1949 the occupying force removed machinery and productive resources from German factories as war reparations and continued to regard the Warsaw Pact satellites as colonies to be plundered at will. All of the science developed at the Sports Institute of Leipzig had to be transferred free of charge to Moscow. Whatever the Germans had learned of the benefit of synthetic testosterone to those enduring heavy training, the Russians had to be told. The Soviet Union had a more cynical view of synthetic assistance: ‘anything that helped was a good thing, a good thing was better if you doubled the dose’, regardless of whether or not the rest of the world had banned it.
Grobler’s task was to get back ahead of the nation that had significantly less regard for the welfare of its athletes or international law. He could not simply raise the dose of training and testosterone to match, and hope that he could find enough athletes from a population of sixteen million to beat the best selected from 260 million.
Grobler has said recently that he thought the GDR was overtraining at that time. His experience told him that he should monitor performance daily to be aware of the dangers of pushing athletes too hard. The sloppy, ‘couldn’t care less’ style of the men when they were not racing was the outcome of thousands of kilometres on the water each year. Increasing the load would lower the quality of the work still further. He also knew that the synthetic testosterone given to the women was at the upper limit of what would be helpful. Women were showing the effects of permanently deepened voices, burgeoning body hair and – according to Brigitte Berendonk, a West German shot-put champion, and her husband, the microbiologist Werner Franke – markedly