Читать книгу More Power: The Story of Jurgen Grobler: The most successful Olympic coach of all time - Christopher Dodd - Страница 13

5

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