More Power: The Story of Jurgen Grobler: The most successful Olympic coach of all time. Christopher Dodd

with hammers and pickaxes. Dr Theo Koerner was in a similar quandary as he lay in bed at the Calvary Hospital in Canberra, Australia, having suffered deep vein thrombosis while lecturing to the Oceania Olympic Solidarity rowing seminar on talent identification. In East Berlin, Jürgen and Angela Grobler watched the same scene during a party for a fellow coach, and then drove toward the Brandenburg Gate to see what was going on for themselves. In one extraordinary evening, the GDR vanished before their eyes, and their livelihood hung in limbo.

      East Germany’s collapse came about when Günter Schabowski, the government spokesman, botched his announcement of travel visas being made available in the days that followed. When asked on camera when the free visa system would begin, he answered ‘this evening’, thus triggering the opening of the borders to the West. The border police were ordered to lay down their arms. By dawn on 10 November there was still a wall, but no longer a border with the Federal Republic.

      Jürgen Grobler, like every East German citizen, would have been reminded from a young age at school and by the state newspaper Neues Deutschland that socialism was right and everlasting, while capitalism was corrupt and destined to end cataclysmically. Whatever he felt deep down, the high-ranking coach was obliged to rub along with the Marxist-Leninist philosophy that underpinned every action of the state. But by 1989 the state was resorting to increasingly desperate measures to stay afloat, and people were apprehensively aware of what was afoot. Soviet newspapers were suppressed because they reported President Gorbachev’s perestroika in too much detail. West Germany was invited to pay for exit visas to allow East Germans to leave. The leavers were branded as troublemakers for seeking a better life on a different path. For the GDR these visas had two benefits: they transferred wealth from West to East and they got rid of the riff-raff.

      When the East German bubble burst, the rowers’ training continued toward an uncertain future. The economic system that had supported elite athletes so well persisted for a while as the country moved swiftly to reunification with the Federal Republic. Many rowers and coaches stayed on as they looked about them for what was next, while many suffered from depression. Jana Sorgers was a case in point. After stroking the quad to her fifth successive gold medal at the 1990 world championships in Tasmania, she ‘fell into a hole’ and dropped out of rowing for two years before making a successful comeback wearing a German shirt in Atlanta in 1996. Half of Grobler’s squad went to Tasmania, where they won three golds and three bronzes. ‘Not brilliant, but acceptable’, he would say in another year, but this time the surprise was that his pair and coxless four were beaten by West German crews. The Wall had truly disintegrated.

      A year before the Wall fell Ian Wilson, Europe Agent for the oar makers Concept2 (and the enormously successful Nottinghamshire County Rowing Association), was negotiating the sale of hundreds of the company’s new carbon-fibre blades to Klaus Filter, the East’s equipment guru. As Filter checked every single blade with meticulous attention to detail, Wilson casually asked if there was an East German coach who might be suitable for a post at Leander Club in Henley. Filter suggested Grobler as the experimenter among the East German coaches and as the most curious one who reads, listens and tries everything. Wilson remembers Filter and Grobler measuring oars with one-metre rulers and giving them five-metre retractable tape to aid their labours.

      After the deal was struck and after the Wall was breached, several senior GDR officials and their wives, including Jürgen and Angela, were invited to the world indoor championships in Boston, Massachusetts. Klaus turned up with a bagful of chunks of the Berlin Wall that he distributed as souvenirs. Wilson brought a bagful of five-metre measuring tapes to the party.

      One of the competitors in Boston was Britain’s outstanding talent, Steve Redgrave, and Wilson the matchmaker ensured that Grobler at the very least set eyes on him. What followed was an invitation to visit Henley-on-Thames that summer, where Redgrave was based at Leander Club.

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      SUNDAY 8 JULY 1990

       Henley-on-Thames

       ‘I am a club man. I like the physical existence of a clubhouse where you can gather and talk to the old guys.’

      – JÜRGEN GROBLER

      Henley Royal Regatta was a quintessential blend of Britishness in 1990. After a heady year in 1989, when it celebrated 150 years of rowing and garden-partying with a record entry for its fourteen events, it relaxed into its normal self. Normal, that is, for the home crowd, but surely bewildering to a quizzical family from, say, Magdeburg.

      In the generally glorious summer of 1990, rain fell intermittently and heavily on the first two days, before sunshine and warmth prevailed for the weekend’s semi-finals and finals. The two-by-two racing was enlivened on all five days by blustery crosswinds that fanned wobbly steering and controversy over umpires’ decisions.

      Meanwhile, there was some serious rowing going on in the competition for Henley’s coveted trophies, witnessed by a visitor in transition from one indulgent elite to another, and who would give British rowing a charge of East European science and ruthlessness. The visitors came from a state that had lost all its gloss for the majority of the people but where the elite had the same sense of entitlement as the high command of British rowing. The fashions in clothes, hairstyles and spectacles may have been different, but there was little distinction between the hangers-on of the GDR nomenklatura