The winter work Grobler insisted on was exhausting, particularly the cross-country skiing. At altitude the combination of thin air and side-by-side track racing left even the most athletic gasping. The importance of this exhaustion was to root out the weak in body or will. For the survivors there was the ‘assistance’ available by means of Oral Turinabol. Sorgers opined that the blue pills were given to and taken by the whole squad. If they wished to survive in the privileged world that they had come to expect, they took the pill. It was so much a part of the system and morality that the question of side effects that obsessed critics never occurred to the athletes. The long hours of Marxist-Leninist discussion had a purpose and effect. They believed in their coaches as agents of a state that, to them at least, was benign and extremely generous.
Sorgers says that the synthetic testosterone was used only during periods of very heavy training and was accompanied with the explanation that it was to assist a more rapid recovery. As this was perceptible and could be measured by the coaches, it was easy to believe. Nevertheless, athletes were aware that the drug was regarded as illegal. All East German rowers gave regular urine and blood samples which were tested at Kreischa near the Czech border to determine that no trace of the synthetic testosterone remained after the little blue pills had been changed from Oral Turinabol or Clomiphen to a harmless placebo. The accuracy of the tests resulted in no East German rower testing positive, ever. It is a nice irony that today the laboratory at Dresdner Straße 12 in Kreischa is one of the few approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) for tests to catch twenty-first-century cheats.
Sorgers sculled on in the quad to Atlanta in 1996, where she and her coach Lau represented a united Germany. Lau’s programme was the same as her old East German one although, Sorgers said, ‘it felt much harder.’ Because it did not include any synthetic testosterone.
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While Jana Sorgers was going for her second world junior championship in 1985, the seniors gathered at Hazewinkel in Belgium. The boycotters of the Los Angeles Olympics were all back in the boat and the East German women resumed their position at the head of the medal table, with four wins, a second and a third, while the Soviets took one gold and one silver. Jutta Lau retired from competition after several illustrious years as a prominent sculler and was fast-tracked into Grobler’s coaching team. She knew his methods well and was a reliable disciple.
For the 1986 season the 18-year-old Sorgers, with two junior world golds in her kit bag, was transferred to the senior squad in Grünau on the outskirts of East Berlin. She made the top seven in the sculling trials and moved into the quad. She was with a future Olympic champion single sculler, Birgit Peter, and two older women. By now the international federation had extended the women’s racing distance to 2000 metres, and at the world championships in Nottingham the quad racked up a seven-second margin over second-placed Romania. This was a sweet revenge because Romania had evaded the Soviet Union’s Los Angeles boycott by Warsaw Pact nations, and had taken five of the six rowing golds in women’s events there. For Grobler to assert so convincingly that the Romanian success would be countered was part of the realpolitik of his role. Despite this success, Romania’s heavy investment in its women’s programme was to become a force equal to his own.
Immediately after his team missed the libido and booze-fuelled post-championships party to catch its charter flight from East Midlands airport, Grobler set the targets for the 1987 season that would climax in Copenhagen. The programme performed with its customary authority in the early regattas, when Grobler’s super-compensation cycle required his athletes to race without full recovery early in the season. They would compete with measured tiredness at continental regattas, so they had to work harder to win than when they were in the pink. They would then reach the final of the championships with 100 per cent of their available energy, and were able to race more easily and improve their position relative to the best crews.
In 1987 the conditions were awful on finals day. Martina Schröter, the single sculler at Copenhagen, raced in such a headwind that she took nine and a quarter minutes to cover 2000 metres and finished fifteen seconds behind the Bulgarian whose lane afforded shelter from the cross-headwind. The women’s double scull of Beate Schramm and Sylvia Schwabe went to the 1500-metre mark in the fastest two places, as expected, and then lost ten seconds after a crab (catching the top edge of the oar under water resulting in a sudden – often dramatic – brake on the boat), fading to fifth. Only the quadruple scull with Sorgers in the bows came good and won.
In all, Grobler’s team took one gold and three silvers, with the eight and the coxed four out of the medals. It was a poor result by East German standards, but he will have calculated the lane differences and known where his preparation or selection was deficient and where it was appropriate to blame the conditions. By this time in his career he was more likely to blame his training programme – now tailored to each athlete – than to assume that the weather or any outside factor was the cause.
The next stop was the Olympics in Seoul. For Korea in 1988 Grobler stuck to his usual approach, calling for quality and applying his objective method of selection. Lau was now personally responsible for the quadruple scull and, although obliged to take the women who finished fourth to seventh in trials, was allowed to allot seats. Sorgers moved from bow to stroke and was made responsible for changes of pace in a crew that – assisted as ever by Filter’s subtle adjustments to the rig – enjoyed nigh-perfect uniformity of movement. Sorgers’ strength off the start and her ability to hold the length of the arc of the stroke while dropping the rate to race pace were two reasons for her crew being able to complete the first 500 metres in 89 seconds, and then pass through the next quarters in 98.5 and 98.3 seconds. This was as close a call as Lau or Grobler could ask for, and when the Russians came from the back to push towards the line, Sorgers raised the pace again to cover the last 500 metres in 95 seconds, a well-nigh perfect race profile. In addition, the East German coxed four and eight won their events. Grobler had delivered again, although his crew coaches took the honours. East Germany’s women had five of Seoul’s six gold medals.
Seoul would be the last Olympic games in which East Germany would compete as a separate nation. For the third time it finished second to the Soviet Union and ahead of the United States. The political point of the country’s sporting prowess had been well made, and now the economic cost of the socialist path was draining the patience of the people, just as it was doing in the other Warsaw Pact countries languishing behind the Iron Curtain. By the time the Olympic family would meet again in Barcelona, the GDR would no longer exist and many of its rowers would be competing for a unified Germany. But as the Olympic flame was extinguished in Seoul, no one knew that. On the long flight home from the Far East, Grobler would have asked himself what his next GDR Olympiad would bring, and what his next trajectory of crew improvement would look like in each of his boat classes – beginning with a world championships in Bled, less than a year away – just as he had done after the previous four Olympiads.
The post-Seoul conference of the East German rowing federation in January 1989 set out the next expected gold-medal times and the training structure required to achieve them, led by the technical director, Dr Theo Koerner. Grobler stayed in his post as director of women’s rowing and prepared his team for Bled in September. He had few new faces, and the experienced team took four gold and two silver medals, including a gold for the coxless four that replaced the coxed four in the world championship programme. He had little to report on his return to Germany because it had all gone eerily to plan. He gave his squad three weeks off and planned the trip to Lake Barrington in Tasmania for the next world championships, scheduled for November 1990.
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On the evening of 9 November 1989 Wilfried Hofmann,