Once selected, the team flew to a training camp at Sudbury on Lake Ontario, Canada, and spent weeks in acclimatisation and intense training leading up to the taper, during which the last super-compensation cycle was completed and the athletes recovered in time to arrive at the Olympic final in the highest possible state of fitness. There is one comic footnote in the GDR rowing story in the Stasi report on the 1976 team which lists the competitors, the entourage and – more important than the event they have trained for over a lifetime – their membership, or otherwise, of the party. Also listed is the duration and destination of telephone calls outside East Germany and other trivia that obsessed the Stasi. Buried in the notes on conversations with girls in Copenhagen is an urgent message to the managers of the rowing team to destroy their stocks of Oral Turinabol, Clomiphen and other anabolic steroids before leaving Sudbury for Montreal and the Games. The GDR boxing team had arrived in Montreal with the pills in their baggage, and to avoid detection they had been obliged to tear off the Jenapharm labels and throw everything into the St Lawrence river. The rowers were instructed not to make the same mistake.
Once they reached the Montreal finals, both Jürgen’s crews exhibited his even-paced tactic demonstrated in Munich four years earlier. The quadruple scull, stroked by Güldenpfennig, tussled with the Russian quad for the first three 500-metre segments of the course with just fractions of a second separating them. Then in the last quarter the East Germans maintained their pace as the Russians faded, and the GDR quad took two seconds off the Soviet Union to win by half a length. In the coxed pair, Jährling and Ulrich came off the start slowly into the headwind and were seemingly stuck in third place until the 1500-metre mark, before sustaining then raising their race pace at the close to finish two seconds clear of the field. Grobler had seen his crews take the first two of his extraordinary collection of gold medals.
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Of little concern to Grobler in Montreal were the shoots of a revolution growing in Britain. Bob Janoušek, the two-time Olympic bronze medallist, had trained at Charles University in Prague to a similar curriculum to the one in Leipzig but with less Marxist-Leninism or biochemistry of testosterone. Czechoslovakia had its big crisis with communism in 1968, and in 1969 Janoušek was allowed to take up the offer of a job from the Amateur Rowing Association (now British Rowing). His family came with him on the understanding that they would not be allowed to return to Czechoslovakia. When he arrived in England, he wrote a training programme for international athletes which adapted tried-and-tested East European methods. After a year, however, he found that nobody was following it and that the British national team’s results were as bad as ever. Where, in odd cases, a crew and a coach could be found who did manage the long endurance training, there was an increase in lower-back injuries since the change of style required building up muscles and joints to take the stress, which meant a different regime from that of the traditional style of rowing in England.
After the debacle of the gale-torn 1973 world championships in Moscow, Janoušek decided that he would coach a national squad crew himself. He redesigned the system around training once a day after work, starting at 6 p.m. and attempting to be back in the boathouse in two hours. In an hour and a half of useful training he squashed as much as he could from the four- to five-hours system he had learned while reading sports science at Karlovy University and as a rower in Prague. The programme meant masses of intense work to build up lactic acid in the joints and pushing his men to exhaustion on every piece of work. Because they had not developed strong enough back muscles to lift their body and boat up from a long lean forward, Janoušek trained his crew to sit upright and use the sliding seat to compress their legs, so that the buttocks touched the ankles at full compression over the foot stretcher. From there they started the pull of the stroke with an explosive lift of the legs and the back together. Janoušek’s trademark call was ‘Smash it in’. His technique was the epitome of the Kernschlag (solid stroke with a hard beginning) style as opposed to the Schubschlag (thrust stroke) style around which all the East German boats, training, diet and medicine were designed.
After one winter of this method Janoušek took his squad to Mannheim to race in the docks over a slightly short course of 1800 metres for the first international regatta of the 1974 season. His coxed and coxless fours beat both East and West Germans at a canter on the first day. Combined as an eight on the second day, Janoušek’s crew was beaten by the West Germans when they tried to row in the same style at thirty-six strokes to the minute, using fewer, stronger strokes to cover the distance. Janoušek drew the squad together on the following Monday and told them they would never win against endurance-trained athletes unless they learned to race at forty strokes to the minute for the whole distance. They did so. Janoušek’s eight developed very high speeds and generally won races by sprinting to the front and holding on in fast conditions, but in long slow races against a headwind, they tended to lose against endurance-trained crews. Janoušek knew that his methods devised to meet the need of those in full-time employment might fail in a race that favoured endurance over speed. But he also knew that, in the unsupported world of British sport, there was no other way.
In Montreal, Janoušek’s eight led the final until the East German crew pipped them at the post. Mike Hart and Chris Baillieu also won a silver medal in the double sculls, in their case ahead of East Germans but behind Norwegians.
1980
‘In New Zealand it was a unique occasion for any Westerner to witness the East German rowing team actually skiving. Despite this, the regatta yielded the usual crop of medals for the GDR.’
Jürgen Grobler’s niche in the East German hierarchy was irreversible after his double gold-medal success in Montreal and his ever-strengthening programme at SC Magdeburg that pushed new, competitive athletes to the verge of national selection. By now it was engrained in East Germany’s strategy that after each Olympic Games the tactics for the next cycle were subjected to the full Marxist dialectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in the following January. The predicted gold-medal times were set and the training of the elite squad switched to the new standard at a new intensity. By luck or judgement the Magdeburg scullers finished trials in the right spots to earn places in the quadruple scull for the 1977 world championships to be held in Amsterdam, while the single and double scullers hailed from Rostock, Halle and Berlin.
Thanks to the universal style and Klaus Filter’s rigging adjustments, the new quad was remarkably uniform, with Martin Winter and Wolfgang Güldenpfennig as bookends. The post-Olympic year is often the season when athletes retire or take a year out. In the West they needed to pass exams or earn money, while in the East they were pushed underwater by young bullies coming up behind them. For example, only two members of the British eight that had beaten East Germany into fourth place in 1974 and had finished second in Montreal continued to row in 1977. One of them, Jim Clark, took a silver medal in a pair with newcomer John Roberts. The other, Tim Crooks, finished fourth in the single sculls. His switch from eights to singles, sweep to sculling, was regarded as remarkable and a move that the East Germans would never have allowed.
The East Germans cleaned up in Amsterdam, taking five out of eight gold medals in the men’s events. Curiously, Grobler’s Magdeburg coxed pair of Jährling and Ulrich, Montreal Olympic champions, were beaten into second place by a couple of even bigger Bulgarians. The major upset in 1977 was the win by the British