Grobler, staying in character, analysed every aspect of the training and racing programme and then improved the quality of work by making each part count for more. It is still his mantra today. When he growls ‘more power’ through the megaphone at his crews he is not simply calling for more kilowatts of energy but for better application of whatever strength the athlete has left. He wants the contraction of a muscle to translate directly, with minimum slippage, to lever the boat past the point at which the blade locks into the water. His exemplar was Christine Scheiblich who had been the women’s single-scull champion in Montreal. Klaus Filter tells how one of the difficulties that humans have with boat propulsion is that as the rower reaches the end of the recovery phase of the stroke and is preparing to put his blade into the water, he concentrates his weight onto the balls of his feet while pushing against the foot stretcher. For a moment this negative force is pushing the stern down and stopping the hull before the blade is locked on and the oarsman is pulling the boat forward again. Stopping the boat at the catch is universal except in rare cases like Scheiblich’s. Her timing at the catch was proved to be perfect in every type of test that Filter could devise. Scheiblich was one of the weakest athletes in the team and yet she won all her world championships races by large margins. The first Olympic final for women scullers in Montreal was one of the closest and untypical when the American Joan Lind chased her to within half a length. Scheiblich was followed by Thomas Lange and a few others on whom Grobler has modelled the ideal stroke. He has since asked athletes to treat the foot stretcher, which fixes all the thrust of the rower as the oar is levered past the pin, as if it was as fragile as an eggshell. He wants the power to build off the stretcher, not be applied with a macho bang. More power is to be used to make the boat go fast, not just to build big shoulders.
Grobler was known, then as now, as a man in constant search for the different angle, the unexpected factor which would make a difference to boat speed. Although he had worked closely with Peter Schwanitz and Filter throughout his career and knew the biomechanic’s and boat-builder’s reasoning and science as well as his own, he was aware that parallel work was being carried on in the West. After his eight had finished third in 1982 in Lucerne, he bought a new eights shell from the manufacturer Empacher in West Germany. Although he asked his sweep oarswomen to train in it for months, they were unable to make any sense of it. Percentage gold-medal times were well off the mark. As Filter told him before and after the extremely expensive experiment, the way the East German boats were designed and built and the way the East German athletes were taught to row was compatible. The Empacher was designed for a different, more universal style, with more compression of the legs and less reach of the body and arms. In the language of Das Rudern, it was made for a Kernschlag not Schubschlag style.
Characteristically Jürgen learns from mistakes like that and absorbs the new information into his formidable bank of rowing experience which, after nearly fifty years as a professional coach, cannot be matched. The following year, in the 1983 world championships, his team earned the result he wanted: four golds and two silvers put the East German women back on top of the table. The Russian flare was waterlogged.
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Grobler entered the final year of preparation for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics with every expectation of being able to repeat the success of Moscow. The preparation went well, with altitude camps in Mexico and Silvretta on the Austrian–Swiss border, and a European season of regattas that would culminate in Lucerne on 7–9 July. Then without warning, on 8 May 1984, the Soviet Union declared that it was so concerned about the commercialisation of the Los Angeles Games and was so worried about team security that it would withdraw its competitors. Two days later East Germany and Vietnam announced that they, too, would withdraw.
Whatever your position in East German society, whether one of the chosen nomenklatura or a factory worker, you could not protest or gainsay an edict from the Politbüro, which ran the state from the top to the very bottom. For the Politbüro to be denied the chance to exhibit German superiority in competitive sport was as bitter for its members as being cut out of a chance of Olympic glory was for 20-year-olds who had spent four years and 50,000 km at the oar. The instruction came from Moscow, intended as a Cold War strike against the US president, Ronald Reagan. It was a plain tit-for-tat response to the American boycott of Moscow four years earlier.
As a consequence, rowers who did win gold on Lake Casitas, outside Los Angeles, speak of their results at Lucerne regatta beforehand as the real marker of their quality. Martin Cross – who rowed at bow in the four stroked by Steve Redgrave and that won the first British Olympic rowing gold since 1948 – always takes a second breath to speak of beating the East German coxed four in Lucerne. The GDR, whether it won or lost, was the benchmark for all international rowing events in those years.
From the announcement of the GDR’s withdrawal on 10 May 1984, Grobler knew that there was no chance of a change of mind. He set about measuring how much improvement in standard times was likely at Seoul in 1988, and then refined his programme to ensure that his cohort would be in the lead once more.
Through all these years he had been drafting new faces into the senior group, most of whom had won gold at world junior championships. There were not enough places in the senior squad to accommodate everyone with world junior championship golds who might have expected to rise to senior success, and Grobler was obliged to cut those who would not make the step up. All who experienced it said that Grobler was clear and kind in the way he told people that they were about to be dropped from a programme in which they had striven ridiculously hard and from which they, their families and schools, had benefited. He had no need to blend youth and experience because those in the lower women’s ranks had been exposed to international racing from the beginning and fought their way into the top group by winning hard races. They knew about survival from experience.
One of his juniors, Jana Sorgers, was picked up during her eighth year at school as a naturally athletic girl who stood at 1m 82cm. She was offered a place at SC Dynamo in Potsdam, near Berlin. This involved living at the clubhouse, with trips home every fourth weekend. At first she was homesick and asked to return to her family. Her mother argued that hers was an opportunity not to be missed. She knew what her 14-year-old daughter could not know: that the life of an elite athlete would open a whole new world for her. There were also benefits for the family, including a better flat and access to higher-paid employment. A compromise was reached: Jana was allowed to spend every weekend at home, and her projection into the sports training elite provided a lift for the Sorgers family.
Jana’s schoolwork continued at SC Dynamo through teachers seconded to the club, but the emphasis was on training, perfecting and cementing the movements of her new sport. For two years her training load was increased steadily. Racing and testing was continuous, and culminated in her winning trials for the junior national team to race in the championships in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1984. The East German juniors were even more dominant than the seniors, partly because few other nations were organised to select composite crews drawn from across the country. When composites were formed, the training period was short. But in the GDR the team was being built from the earliest stage possible. Sorgers won again in the 1985 junior championships in Brandenburg, and consequently transferred to the senior squad, directed by a coach she had not come across before: Jürgen Grobler.
When asked if Grobler had favourites among the women’s squad, she admits that she was perhaps one of them, but the relationship did not extend to him doing any favours for her or anyone else. He was supportive when any athlete was struggling or under-performing. He would modify the programme and give the athlete every chance to recover their form, but if improvement didn’t come, he dropped them. He had a gauge, which became more sophisticated with experience, based on his understanding of psychology and physiology on whether there was another good championships performance to be had from an athlete. If he concluded they could not raise their game for another great effort he would end their careers gently but firmly. He knew the cost in physical training and emotion of a gold medal and he hated a futile enterprise.
All juniors started out in sculling boats. After the basic skills were mastered and their bodies had matured, they switched