Читать книгу More Power: The Story of Jurgen Grobler: The most successful Olympic coach of all time - Christopher Dodd - Страница 11
Оглавление1980
‘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 double scullers Mike Hart and Chris Baillieu who had followed their own idiosyncratic path since winning the Boat Race for Cambridge a decade before. They took two seconds off the East Germans Rüdiger Reiche and Ulli Schmeid. This world medal was Britain’s first gold since the London Olympics of 1948.
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East Germany had no need to search out British crews when Jürgen Grobler began coaching at international level in 1972. The first time the East Germans had taken notice of Brits was at Mannheim regatta in 1974 when Bob Janoušek entered two British fours which beat the components of the GDR eight. Janoušek had been one of the first East Europeans to take a senior job in the West. He brought success to British crews by using the super-compensation cycle combined with a precise and cleverly worked-out style that combined the skills of men moulded in a variety of club traditions to train in his squad.
An exit from communist society as achieved by Janoušek was denied to that generation of East Germans. The carrot that brought them home from trips abroad was the high standard of daily life that they enjoyed over the ordinary citizen. As the years passed and the East German economy performed less well in relation to the West, this became more marked. Few athletes saw a better life for themselves outside their ever-generous and grateful state. Retribution for flight was swift and tortuous on families and even on scant associates of defectors. People caught trying to cross the fence were shot. Border guards were brutal, starving and beating their dogs to increase the viciousness with which they chased and ravaged anyone found in the vicinity of the fence. The state authorities did not get the irony that anyone who chose not to share in their ‘socialist happiness’ would be shot for being unhappy. The only rower to defect and quit the good life was Matthias Schumann, who won gold in the eights at the 1978 world championships. He absconded in 1981 when racing in Amsterdam, and settled in Dortmund, West Germany, and worked as a sports reporter and photographer. He does not discuss the cost to his relations left behind in East Germany.
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The prospect of the 1978 world championships at Lake Karapiro on the North Island of New Zealand was enticing for anyone held behind the Iron Curtain. It meant at least six weeks abroad and would be the most prolonged taste of life on the other side that they would experience. Grobler took the quadruple scull – this time with Martin Winter in the number-three seat behind Frank Dundr at stroke – and duly won.
Karapiro Lake is formed behind a hydroelectric dam in the Waikato River. Coaches were unable to use motor launches because of restrictions to conserve the wonderful, wild nature of the site. There was no waterside path for cyclists either, so the best that coaches could do was to set up a deck chair camp on a prominent hill and observe training through binoculars. In the fortnight before competition, East German crews covered their normal massive number of kilometres per day at low intensity, and were instructed to follow the river upstream and out of sight of the coaching team and its Stasi informers.
The British spare man at Karapiro had been a member of Janoušek’s 1976 eight and had recently followed Tim Crooks in converting from rowing to sculling. He wanted mileage to develop the new skill and was following a similar training programme to the East Germans. About a week before the start of racing, when he was far upstream of the course, he rounded a sharp bend into a steep-sided, sheltered cove to find the entire GDR team sitting in their boats and quietly enjoying a long rest – while their coaches imagined they were grinding out the obligatory daily paddling ration of 35 km. 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 with the men taking five golds and two silvers in eight events and the women three golds and one silver in six events.
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The international federation had awarded the championships in the year before the Moscow Olympics to Bled in Slovenia. Slovenia was the richest province in the state of Yugoslavia and resembled its western neighbour, Austria, more than the rough side of the Iron Curtain. The East German contingent performed as before, with nine golds between the men and the women. Grobler’s quadruple scull won, with his Magdeburg oarsman Peter Kersten at bow, while the double scull with Martin Winter at stroke finished third. Because Frank and Alf Hansen of Norway competed in the double sculls at almost every championships from 1972 to 1979 and usually finished first or second, it was an event that was hard for East Germany to be sure of a medal, and so the preference for a place in the quadruple sculls became even more marked. Grobler had to innovate little in these years to keep his golden record.
If the Politbüro generated an imperative of success over the hated capitalist Federal Republic of Germany in the 1972 Olympics, the target for the 1980 Games in Moscow was the Soviet Union. The USSR treated East Germany as a vassal, a tiny buffer state on the edge of the Russian empire. The East Germans set out to capture Soviet gold on Russian flat water. For the Moscow Games the stakes were high: to finish third in the table, and closer to the masters than before.
Grobler was still attached to his club athletes at Magdeburg. His coxed pair of Harald Jährling and Friedrich-Wilhelm Ulrich, steered by Georg Spohr, was a club crew that even when missing selection as a pair usually found seats in an eight or a four. In 1980 they hit form and reached Moscow under Grobler’s charge. Peter Kersten – who had been in the quadruple scull and in and around the top group of scullers and who was, like Wolfgang Güldenpfennig, on the small side – won the trials and took the single-sculling spot. Martin Winter was allotted the stroke seat in the quad.
Preparation for Moscow was disrupted on 20 January 1980 when the US president, Jimmy Carter, decided to use the Olympics as a bargaining counter to persuade the Soviet Union that its December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan should stop and an immediate withdrawal follow. Carter said that the United States would boycott the Games unless the Soviet Union withdrew its army. An American boycott posed no threat to any of Grobler’s athletes, but much depended on whether West Germany and Norway aligned themselves with the Americans.
While argument raged, the rowing nations continued to train through the spring and summer, culminating at the traditional last try-out before the championships at Lucerne regatta. Peter-Michael Kolbe of West Germany and the Hansen brothers of Norway were on stunning form, and their eventual withdrawal from Moscow led to speculation as to whether the Olympic results would have been the same without Carter’s action. The US president declared that any US citizens who travelled to compete would find their passports revoked on return. In Britain, prime minister Margaret Thatcher made similar noises but parliament allowed individual governing bodies to make their own decisions. The Amateur Rowing Association – amid much opprobrium and in the teeth of its president Christopher Davidge’s conviction that it should drop out – went to Moscow anyway, but on a shoestring after its sponsors withdrew. There was almost no government money in British Olympic sport then. Ironically, in spite of her criticism of those who defied her wish and competed, Mrs Thatcher appointed the cox of the eight, Colin Moynihan, as her minister for sport in 1987.
The one beneficiary of the boycott was Henley regatta, which obtained a stunning last-minute entry for its Grand Challenge Cup. Four teams which boycotted Moscow – the United States, Norway, West Germany and New Zealand – fielded eights in Henley’s premier event. The US defeated New Zealand in a thumping final.
The Hansens and Kolbe competed in the Grand at Henley, but were spitting with anger at the wreckage of their careers. The politicians who did the wrecking were too short-sighted to understand that a decade of war in Afghanistan would drain the Russian treasury, much as Vietnam had drained the United States a decade earlier. It was the reforming president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who pulled his country back from Kabul in 1989 after ten years of engagement. Within a year his Soviet empire had collapsed.
Although Moscow was the least glamorous Olympics of his career, Grobler was satisfied that his crews had peaked at the right time. He might have been surprised that his single sculler, Kersten, was beaten by Vasily Yakusha, a Belorussian competing for the Soviet Union. Yakusha had finished last in the Bled final a year earlier. He came from fourth place at the 1500-metre point in a close field, and swept through in the last 500 metres to take the silver behind the Finn Pertti Karppinen who had led from gun to tape.
When Grobler came home to Magdeburg and reviewed his career and its numerous gold medal successes, he was in a strong position to decide for himself where ‘Schweinsdick’ should go next.
