Читать книгу More Power: The Story of Jurgen Grobler: The most successful Olympic coach of all time - Christopher Dodd - Страница 10
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‘He began informing quietly eighteen months after the first approach. He was given the lightest disguise possible with the codename, “Jürgen”.’
– HUGH MATHESON
The Olympics crossed the Atlantic after Munich but, before the flame reached Montreal in 1976, international rowing had changed profoundly. The last European championships of the era were held in 1973 on the Krylatskoe course on the western edge of Moscow where winning medals had been turned into a lottery by a ferocious wind which allowed the crews on or close to lane one an advantage of up to ten seconds over lane six. Güldenpfennig finished third behind the new West German sensation, 20-year-old Peter-Michael Kolbe, who had drawn ‘lucky’ lane one.
The IOC added six women’s events to the Olympic rowing programme for 1976. FISA, the international federation, set the distance for women’s events at 1000 metres – half that for men – in the mistaken impression that women lacked endurance strength in the same way they lacked explosive strength compared to men. But the shorter course gave the advantage to athletes with more explosive strength and greater muscle bulk while taking it away from the longer-limbed, leaner and more lithe athletes. In its preliminary selection of women likely to enjoy and prosper in competitive rowing, East Germany sought out the same body type favoured for field events such as shot put and discus. Coincidentally this short, three-minute race gave added scope for the use of synthetic testosterone. It was another twelve years before FISA corrected this mistake by extending the women’s distance to 2000 metres in time for the XXIV Olympiad in Seoul in 1988.
Meanwhile, Jürgen Grobler’s next fortunate break after bringing Güldenpfennig from his provincial club to an Olympic medal was the introduction of the men’s quadruple sculls to the world and Olympic regatta schedule from 1974. The IOC agreed to the addition in 1971, but FISA only ratified the boat in its programme in October 1973, ten months before the world championship regatta in Lucerne the following August. It was hardly surprising that the 1974 East German team came closest to a total shut-out, when the men’s team won six golds and one silver medal, with the eight in fourth place. The GDR women were similarly dominant with four golds, a silver and a bronze medal.
The quadruple sculls, with the added weight of a coxswain, had been introduced to the women’s international programme in 1957, when East Germany won its first medal, a bronze for the crew from the Sports Institute of Leipzig. By the mid-seventies the East German system was producing a squad of scullers – both men and women – big and strong enough to win the single, double and quadruple categories. Athletes rotated between boats according to the finest calculations of coaches as to which event had the weakest foreign competition and could thus be won without necessarily absorbing all the talent. There was a bias in favour of the sculling events, which arose from the national policy – set out in full in Das Rudern – that the novice should begin with, and master, sculling and the technique of handling an oar in each hand. Most of their time was spent in the single-scull boat before they took up ‘sweep’ rowing, in which a single oar is held in both hands.
Das Rudern asserted: ‘It may be pointed out that youths can learn sweep rowing quite early on without hesitation, but on orthopaedic grounds, they should not be allowed to take part in sweep boat competitions until boys are fourteen and girls are sixteen. Learning periods for sweep rowing should not exceed one hour.’ The outcome of this early concentration on sculling up to the years of competition and selection is that the best and most able athletes were trained and tested as scullers first, and promoted to the elite programmes as scullers, leaving lower achievers to crew the bigger sweep boats.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s East German teams had an extraordinary record in the smaller sweep classes of coxless pairs and fours, but more patchy outcomes in the larger eights. The results in the two sculling events were also not so glittering because the single and double scullers were more likely to be pitched up against a lone outstanding athlete, representing a minor rowing nation that was not sufficiently organised to manage a coaching and training programme like East Germany’s.
The GDR single-sculling representative always had the hardest task of the team. Gossip was fed to western rowers by Ulli Schmied, two-time Olympic medallist in the double sculls, that the East German sculling squad would endeavour to race hard enough to stay in the top seven but not to be top dog because that would put them in the ‘hard to win’ singles event. They preferred to rank from fourth to seventh to ensure a place in the quadruple sculls. Good evidence backs Schmied’s claim. From 1962 to 1989 the winner of the GDR national team trials and most years, when the timetable allowed, the national championships was selected as the single sculler for the world or European championships (with the exception of 1981 when Rüdiger Reiche raced and won the single at the world championships in Lucerne after Uwe Mund had won the national title). The same principle applied to the double and quadruple sculls: the national champions, drawn from state sports clubs but trained as a composite group, were selected to travel abroad to represent their country.
Because of its unified nationwide programme, all top athletes were matched in style and technique. There were no eccentric coaches in outlying clubs with bees in their bonnets about laying back at the finish until their spines touched the breakwater or other stylistic flourishes. Das Rudern’s chapter on the technique of sculling is inflexible: ‘Since the ends of the inboard levers cut across one another in the pull and in the slide forward, one hand leads slightly and goes slightly under the other at these two points. The rule in the DRSV is: Left hand in front of and under the right hand.’ The passage concludes: ‘This general rule is important and must be binding to avoid losing time when national crews or racing teams are being assembled.’
In the Seventies and Eighties none of the major rowing nations followed such a simple policy, and consequently their top coaches found themselves teaching fully developed scullers to change the leading and higher hand to match new partners. The exceptional results for the GDR came at least as much from ruthless application of very simple rules as from any real difference in style.
The GDR coaches could take the next-best finishers after the single and double scullers had been selected and fit them into a quad boat with little or no adaptation required save to set the rigging to accommodate physical differences in height and reach. Jürgen Grobler was able to place Rüdiger Reiche (1m 98cm) and Güldenpfennig (1m 82cm) together in the 1974 quadruple scull, which won the world championship event. Filter assisted him in this by measuring the most efficient arc of each athlete – some taller, some shorter, some with a short torso and long arms, some blessed with longer legs. Filter then adjusted the length of each scull overall, and the amount of lever from the sculler’s hand to the fulcrum or ‘pin’ and the amount outboard of the pin. What Grobler and Filter devised – in collaboration with the biomechanical expert Schwanitz and all the other branches of their rowing committee – was a particular set-up from the boat’s keel to the tip of his blade for each athlete which would maximise his output while leading to greater uniformity of the whole crew. Thus, to the spectator, the crew looked perfectly uniform in its movements on the water but once they had lifted the boat out of the water and put it on the rack you could see that Reiche and Güldenpfennig were entirely different body types.
Decades later in 1991, when Grobler first started coaching Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, he invited Klaus Filter to advise on the best boat and rig for them to employ. At that time Pinsent was 15 kg heavier and rowing in the bow seat which pushed the boat down into the water at high speed, creating unnecessary drag. Also Pinsent was trying to pull the boat round to demonstrate his strength on every stroke. It was mechanically easier for him because he was closer to the bows. Filter came to live with the boat-builders, the Ayling family, while he redesigned the hull and the material of its construction to suit the two athletes. While Grobler worked on their strength, fitness and race plan, Filter calculated and built the perfect platform for their exceptional strength. The crew improved from bronze medal in 1990 to gold in the 1991 world championships.
None of the small two- or three-athlete nations could compete in the quads. It was a boat type not much used or known in the West until the world received a masterclass from a crew coached by Grobler. By the early Seventies East Germany had 300 professionals involved in coaching and supporting its international rowing community. They were attached to one or other of the fifteen sports centres, and were drawn up from there to train composite international crews selected from several competing centres. Grobler’s star may have been hitched to Güldenpfennig, but he had other Magdeburg athletes like Martin Winter, Peter Kersten and Stefan Weisse up his sleeve. The quadruple scull was the perfect vehicle for his thorough and scientifically tested ambitions, offering the greatest speed per athlete of any boat type. (An eight will go faster, but it has twice the number of bodies to pull it along. All other things being equal, an international eight will cover the 2000-metre course about twenty seconds faster than a quadruple scull.) Jürgen Grobler saw the quad as providing his next step up the coaching hierarchy in East Germany, and it was important that he used the prominence his success with Güldenpfennig had given him wisely. From his first appearance in the national coaching hierarchy, he was known to be ferociously ambitious and he soon acquired the nickname ‘Schweinsdick’ or ‘Piggydick’, which should be translated in an almost admiring way rather like the British would say ‘Goldenballs’. Sometimes the nickname was adapted to ‘Schweine Schlau’ or ‘canny like a pig’ – again generally used affectionately. He was recognised as a man who was ‘always clever’ and who would ‘spot the opportunity and make the right decisions’ to achieve his ambition.
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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If the men’s quadruple scull was what would now be called a ‘gimme’, the men’s coxed pair was the hardest and slowest boat in the regatta. The world champions in 1975 at Nottingham were Jörg Lucke and Wolfgang Gunkel and it was assumed that they would proceed seamlessly to the Montreal Games. But they were beaten in the East German trials by two Magdeburg men trained by Jürgen – at least after he had taken them from Häckel. Friedrich-Wilhelm Ulrich was a world-champion junior and Harald Jährling had won the Spartakiade – an exclusively East German youth championships – in the coxless pairs in 1972. Lucke was 34 at the time of the trials and Gunkel was 28, while the pretenders were both 22 that summer. It was an enormous coup and piece of cheek that put SC Magdeburg and Grobler even more firmly on the map.
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.
