The East German training plan was to row up to 13,000 km a year, which breaks down to about 40 km per day taken in two sessions, with a third session of weights in the gymnasium or cross-country skiing in winter. At this huge quantity, Grobler once said: ‘sometimes we made the work too hard and we got no improvement, [so] it was necessary to do most of the training at less than full pressure.’ The crucial skill in a coach who is pushing athletes to the limit of their natural endurance is to know when they are overtrained. If, at a set time in the cycle, a piece of work is usually done at 80 per cent of gold-medal time and the crew is only able to manage 75 per cent, he must look hard for the reason. In the absence of a better explanation, overtraining is suspected, and either the load is reduced or the capacity of the athlete is increased.
If the speed required to win an Olympic gold medal is 100 per cent, then all training over a measured distance can be expressed as a percentage of gold-medal time. Grobler is well known for his accuracy in predicting the expected improvement in times for each event in the four years leading to the next Olympics. In the autumn of an Olympic year he will make his calculation taking all factors into account, and then correct the time for flat water conditions with no wind assistance or hindrance. The world best-time, usually set in a tight race by one of the best crews in the most favourable following wind, is inevitably much faster than the Olympic gold target. Grobler imported this systematic method to the British team when he arrived at Leander in 1991, having used it with his quadruple scull ten years before. Once the gold-medal standard is set, the coach has a baseline to measure all training, and once he has followed one or two super-compensation cycles he knows how his athletes can be expected to perform.
East Germany’s first generation of athletes trained in its pioneering use of sport as an instrument of foreign policy raced in Mexico in 1968 and retired after Munich in 1972. Four years later the men’s team for the Montreal Olympics looked different, with more opportunities for athletes to push up into the team. Grobler wanted the best of the Magdeburg boys to be among them. In addition to Güldenpfennig and Winter, he had Weisse. He took these three to national trials and formed the quadruple for the world championships in Nottingham in 1975. The final crew, which won the national trials easily, had Güldenpfennig at stroke and Weisse in the number-two seat. His new protégé Winter was selected in the singles and won the bronze medal behind the brilliant but inconsistent Peter-Michael Kolbe of West Germany and the ‘lone wolf’ Irishman, Seán Drea. Joachim Driefke and Jürgen Bertow who had been in the inaugural world-championship quads took the silver medal behind Norway in the double sculls. These results made Ulli Schmied’s point that a gold in the quads was the more certain and easier option.
In a nation where success in international sport was the most praiseworthy achievement a citizen could manage, this shuffling to stay out of the top three, but to finish in the top seven, was almost comic. The presiding genius who somehow ensured that he had most of his club members in the crew and was thus selected to coach them at the world championships and Olympics was ‘Schweinsdick’ Grobler.
There were fifteen trainers in SC Magdeburg when he arrived straight after graduation in 1970, but Grobler soon asserted himself and began to dominate the coaching set-up. When the authors visited the club in June 2017 – on the day before some of the buildings put up at the time of maximum investment by the regime were to be pulled down – they found a group of men in their seventies who had been elite rowers at the time Jürgen arrived. They were reminiscing around a table in the upstairs office, with a half-empty case of beers at their feet. They remembered him as just one of the coaching team – “he was nothing special at first” – but, with frequent breaks to argue about how hard they did or did not have to work and who was in the crew when they won the championships, they gradually recalled the socially adept, seemingly artless man who always spotted the coming talent and then trained it to perform at the highest level. They also remembered how Hörst Häckel, one of the first-team coaches, had taken two of the club’s boys, Friedrich-Wilhelm Ulrich and Manfred Kässner, in the coxless pair to win the world junior championships in 1971 to make SC Magdeburg’s first success on the international stage. Jürgen found another club member to take the first Olympic honours in 1972, and a year after that he had nailed his personal flag to Ulrich and Kässner. Perhaps Häckel had meant it to work out like that, perhaps not. The former rowers had a shrewd idea that Grobler would abide by whatever imperatives the world he lived in required: if success, and the space required to achieve it, was reached by being a member of the party or by paying attention in the daily political education classes, Grobler would conform unobtrusively.
The system needed both the coaches who would tune the engines for its success and it needed plenty of engines ready and willing to be trained. Jan Frehse, later a national and a junior world champion, describes how he was recruited by SC Magdeburg at the age of 14. After a class at his school’s gymnasium a representative from the club asked the assembled pupils: ‘Who here is 1m 80cm tall?’ Frehse was measured as 1m 86cm and asked if he wanted to become an elite sportsman by joining the rowing programme. He says in that winter of 1976–7 there were too few large youngsters in the rowing clubs of the district, so all the schools were searched for suitable candidates. Frehse spent his spring holidays at the club with nineteen other boys. They were measured by strength tests, running competitions and their first attempts at rowing a boat. When Frehse finished top of the group he was subjected to more tests, including a prediction of his fully grown height that turned out to be accurate at 1m 94cm. He was told that rowers from SCM ‘always fulfil their performance orientated mission.’
Throughout the history of the GDR and up to the present day, the Magdeburg club was best known for its handball teams which have been out of the top spot in Germany only rarely since it was founded in 1959. But on his arrival in the club’s rowing arm, standing on the Großer Werder island in the Elbe in the heart of Magdeburg, Grobler found ‘a boat house and a river and nothing else.’ By his intervention a hostel and a state-of-the-art fitness centre were added. It would be wrong to attribute all of this success to Jürgen. He was part of a team of thirty people at the club: fifteen trainers, two administrators, two boat-builders, two drivers, three physiotherapists, a nurse, two doctors and two cooks. The reputation of the club’s education section, which looked after the children who had been taken out of normal school to be trained as athletes, was high too.
The structure of elite sport in East Germany originated in the Politbüro, was encouraged by the SED’s secretary Walter Ulbricht, and driven by the Ministry of State Security, known universally as the Stasi. The Stasi guided every enterprise whether industrial or social. It commanded the scarce resources and directed them where the Politbüro demanded. Every successful person in any walk of life was a member of the party, and every place of work and sports club had at least one informer. According to his personal Stasi file, Jürgen was first approached by the party in 1973 and is recorded as having been recruited in 1975. That means that he was not embarrassed into informing by being caught out in a misdemeanour. Such an occurrence would have made recruitment immediate, a sentence of guilt by blackmail. Instead, he and his Stasi handlers took their time, and he began informing quietly eighteen months after the first approach. He was given the lightest disguise possible with the codename ‘Jürgen’.
Grobler’s party membership, status as an informer and coaching ability were all crucial to obtaining investment and ensuring appropriate support for athletes at the spearhead of the national reputation. From the 1972 Munich Olympics to Moscow in 1980, the coach’s loyalty to Magdeburg athletes was his prime motivation, while his national responsibilities increased.
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