# More Power: The Story of Jurgen Grobler: The most successful Olympic coach of all time

Christopher Dodd, Hugh Matheson

Arguably the greatest coach in British sporting history.

Jurgen Grobler’s Olympic coaching career is one of legend, yet the man himself has remained resolutely out of the spotlight. Over the last twenty years he has masterminded British Rowing’s incomparable success. And when the difference between gold and silver can mean mere fractions of a second, Jurgen Grobler has consistently delivered Olympic gold through various boat classes and with an ever-changing group of athletes.


Arguably the greatest coach in British sporting history, Grobler’s unparalleled record outstrips many much better known records and stories; building champions such as Sir Steve Redgrave, Sir Matthew Pinsent and James Cracknell to name but few.


This authoritative account of Grobler’s career straddles the Iron Curtain, beginning in the German Democratic Republic, where systemic state-funded doping was an open secret, before crossing to Britain following the fall of the Berlin Wall. And whilst culture and sport have shifted dramatically over the last half century, Grobler’s pursuit of greatness has never faltered.


Written by Olympic medallist, Hugh Matheson, and rowing historian, Christopher Dodd, More Power is the unmissable story of one man’s quest for glory, and sets out to unlock the secrets of Jurgen Grobler: the finest coach Olympic sport has ever seen.

THE AUTHORS have been rowing correspondents and commentators throughout Jurgen Grobler’s two lives. They met when Hugh Matheson was rowing in the national squad in the early 1970s and Chris Dodd was chasing the squad round the regatta circuit on behalf of the Guardian. In one capacity or another, they have witnessed all of Grobler’s World and Olympic performances. When Dodd’s Guardian colleague Charlie Burgess was appointed sports editor of the new Independent newspaper in 1986 and sought a rowing specialist, Dodd recommended Matheson who had recently retired as a competitor.

HUGH MATHESON’s rowing career began when he fell into the Thames, aged thirteen, alongside the rafts at Eton. He thrived on the challenge of rowing, loved the adrenalin of racing and was hooked. Ten years on he was rowing in the British coxed four at the Munich Olympics, off the pace and finishing tenth.

Following a silver medal in the Montreal Olympic Games and a year off adapting to an unexpected inheritance in Sherwood Forest, Matheson bought a single sculling boat and found that he preferred to be solely responsible for his failures and successes. Having no one else to blame and no one else to claim the glory was the drug, although it left few excuses for a lamentable sixth place after a boat-stopping entanglement with a lane marker in the final of the single sculls in the Moscow Olympics of 1980.

At the Atlanta Olympics ten years later, Matheson became a summariser for Eurosport, an all-sports subscription television channel. This is his first book.

CHRIS DODD has written about rowing in newspapers, magazines and books since the coming of Janoušek in 1970. His introduction to rowing was as a schoolboy cox at Clifton College, having no talent for cricket. He progressed to the stroke seat of his school’s second eight, a crew that satisfyingly beat the first eight in a challenge race at the end of the season. He stopped rowing after his first term at Nottingham University to edit the student newspaper, which led to a career on the Guardian in 1965.

As a Guardian staffer, his main job was layout, design and section editing in the features department, but he also worked on the sport and city pages. He began writing about rowing at weekends in 1970, covering Boat Races and Henley regattas. He covered his first world championships in 1974 to witness Matheson’s eight win a silver medal, and his first Olympics in 1984 to see Steve Redgrave launch his golden Olympic career in Los Angeles.

Dodd was the founding editor of Britain’s Regatta magazine and FISA’s World Rowing magazine.

In 1994 Dodd turned freelance when his off-the-wall scheme to set up the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames became a reality. He was responsible for creating the rowing collection and library and curating special exhibitions.

Dodd is a board member of the Friends of Rowing History and has contributed to history symposia at the River & Rowing Museum and Mystic Seaport. From 1994 he continued as rowing correspondent at the Guardian until moving to the Independent in 2004.

This is his tenth book (for book details see www.doddsworld.org)

BOOKS BY CHRISTOPHER DODD

Henley Royal Regatta (1981)

The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race (1983)

Boating (1983)

The Story of World Rowing (1992)

Battle of the Blues (Ed, 2004)

Water Boiling Aft (2006)

Pieces of Eight (2012)

Bonnie Brave Boat Rowers (2014)

Unto the Tideway Born (2015)


Copyright


An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018

Copyright © Christopher Dodd and Hugh Matheson 2018

Christopher Dodd and Hugh Matheson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008217815

For Bohumil ‘Bob’ Janoušek who changed the face of British rowing and put Britain’s oarsmen back on the medal podium during his tenure as chief coach from 1970–76.

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1 – The Munich Olympiad

Chapter 2 – The Montreal Olympiad

Chapter 3 – The Moscow Olympiad

Chapter 4 – East Berlin

Chapter 5 – Henley-on-Thames

Chapter 6 – The Barcelona Olympiad

Chapter 7 – The Atlanta Olympiad

Chapter 8 – The Sydney Olympiad

Chapter 9 – The Athens Olympiad

Chapter 10 – The Beijing Olympiad

Chapter 11 – The London Olympiad

Chapter 12 – The Rio Olympiad

Chapter 13 – Rodrigo de Freitas

Epilogue – Florida

Acknowledgements

Appendix 1 – The Stasi papers

Appendix 2 – Olympic Champions

Bibliography

Credits

Photo Section

Index

About the Publisher

Preface

‘Neil, you are a world champion. Now go and derig the boat.’

– JURGEN GROBLER

As More Power went to press, Jurgen Grobler was at the start of his eighth Olympiad as Britain’s chief rowing coach for men, the first year of the four-year cycle that began as the Olympic flame died in Rio’s stadium and will end four years later in Japan when he pilots a voyage to the Tokyo Olympics of 2020. In each of the previous seven Games, crews under his personal coaching have won gold medals, including two in Rio in 2016. At most of the world championships in non-Olympic years, his crews have also won gold medals. The pressure has never been greater for a man in his seventies who began his sensational run of successes in a previous life.

Grobler was brought up in Magdeburg, East Germany, studied at the hothouse of sporting achievement, Leipzig University, and produced Olympic golds in three Games for the country until the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, thawing the Cold War and leading to a new, united Germany. His forty-year Olympic career compares with no other in the history of sport.

From Munich when he was 26 to Rio when he was 70, his athletes have gathered medals on the podium while he has stood nearby with joy and fulfilment on his face. But behind the tears in his eyes, his next campaign is beginning to take shape.

For the few engaged in full-time sport to the millions who watch and dream, the prize-giving and medal-kissing rituals – ceremonies with oldies in blazers and the winners swollen with muscular pride – are as glamorous as anything offered in life. Those peaks are reached only by doing a life term in grim physical exhaustion inspired solely by fear of failure. That’s where Jurgen has lived six days a week for fifty years since the very beginning of his life in rowing at the German College of Physical Culture in Leipzig when he was preparing to climb the podium. Fifteen thousand days, perhaps, of anxiety and expertise, of working through simple solutions to complex problems, always alert for weakness in his athletes and in himself.

His job has offered extreme stress every day since he left school, and the matrix of his economic, political and social life has been as crisis-ridden as anyone’s who has avoided living through a war. When he signed on to become a rowing coach in East Germany, it was an elite profession in a country which had chosen sport as its means of expression to avoid admitting that it was an expendable buffer of the Soviet Union, which in turn was suffering a bad reaction to the strain of its own contradictions.

He was one in a population of fifteen million, many of whom thought the grass was greener on the other side of the concrete wall that had been built ‘for the protection’ of the people, but where they were shot if they did not agree that they were happier where they were.

Countries like East Germany have always depended on State Security and on police, sometimes secret, sometimes public, but always brutal. Every citizen, Jurgen not excepted, has to determine the degree of collaboration he will offer to live the life that suits him and his family. There is discretion in each person’s decision: you can choose to help the state and thrive, or you can offer less and get back much less. No one could treat the GDR with lofty humour and get away with it. Even the elites of the communist party, the SED – the equivalents of Eton, Oxford and a Tory cabinet in Britain – could not crack a joke and survive.

When the GDR suddenly fell apart in 1989, choices had to be made and opportunities grasped. Jurgen brought his family to live in Henley-on-Thames when he was hired to coach the world’s best oarsmen of the time, Steve Redgrave and Matt Pinsent. By fate, luck or design, he exchanged the world’s richest but now defunct rowing country for one destined – with his significant help – to rise to the top of the performance table.

This is his story.

[1]

1972

The Munich Olympiad

‘Grobler understood that collaboration with the other key elements would bring the results the state required.’

– KLAUS FILTER

Three-quarters of the way through the final of the single-sculls event at the Munich Olympics in 1972, German political and sporting history was poised on the needle of a stopwatch. West German Udo Hild was holding bronze-medal place by 0.02 of a second ahead of the young, blond East German, Wolfgang Güldenpfennig. At the 1500-metre mark, with 500 metres of the 2000-metre course left to decide, the question was not only which German was the faster sculler, but also which half of the nation had chosen the right path to prosperity and prestige from the ruins of the Second World War. As it happened, Güldenpfennig, the scion of Magdeburg, powered on to take third place by nearly four seconds from the fading Hild.

This result was vindication for a training programme designed not only to place the Magdeburger ahead of the West German, but to put East Germany, at worst, third on the Olympic medal table behind the United States, the world’s richest nation with a population of 210 million, and the Soviet Union with 260 million people. East Germany at the time had sixteen million and a wealth ranking at least twenty years behind its western neighbour.

Güldenpfennig’s trainer was Jürgen Grobler, a 26-year-old assistant coach born and raised in Magdeburg. He had been a clever opportunist to identify Güldenpfennig and take him through national trials to the Olympic podium. He was an interpreter of a method and practice of rowing that informed the entire national effort, a practice that brought East Germany a harvest of sixty-six medals in 1972 – exactly two-thirds of the total won by the table-toppers, the Soviet Union. Grobler had a deeply researched and tested system on which to lean: East Germany’s thrust to pile up medals at the 1972 Games in Munich was a national one-party-state sponsored effort, aimed particularly at the hated Federal Republic where Munich was the capital of Bavaria.

East Germany, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, grew out of the post-war Soviet occupation zone and derived its authority from the Socialist Unity Party, or SED, and its Politbüro. It began its life as a separate nation in the buffer zone between East and West during the Cold War in 1949, when Jürgen Grobler was a three-year-old growing up in Magdeburg, a town almost completely destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945. It controlled every aspect of his life for the next forty years until it crumbled after its border crossings were thrown open and its people tore down the hated Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Team GDR, as the state would have been branded in the twenty-first century, had done well in the XIX Olympiad held in Mexico City, where a new rowing course was built at Xochimilco at an altitude of 2200 metres above sea level. Mexico was the first Games in which the two Germanys fielded separate teams, and what distinguished East Germany from all its competitors was the analysis to which the Mexico experience was submitted. The training programmes used since Tokyo in 1964 and the benefits and hazards of altitude training in particular were reassessed ruthlessly, and the ‘right’ approach was hammered out at a conference hosted by Manfred Ewald, the president of the German Gymnastics and Sports Federation, the body created to lead the impoverished nation to prestige on the international stage. Sport was a branch, or at least the principal lever, of foreign policy in the Politbüro’s grand plan of 1959, and the Politbüro now had evidence that it was working. Rowing was established at all fifteen high-performance centres to give selected athletes the environment and support necessary to achieve the great things expected of them. The sportsclub at Magdeburg was in addition to the two nineteenth-century rowing clubs in the town that enjoyed good stretches of water on the Elbe for training and racing.

Ewald set the standard of achievement: ‘The objective in Munich can only be to defend the third position won in Mexico and thus to place ahead of West Germany.’ The federation decided that it should refine the number of disciplines in which East Germany could excel and concentrate the effort on eighteen summer sports. Among other excluded sports were basketball and modern pentathlon. In the case of basketball, there was no domestic league to match the Americans and, therefore, no realistic chance of a gold medal. As for modern pentathlon, one-fifth of the points come from a show-jumping competition on a horse picked at random from a paddock of similarly trained animals. Too much is left to chance for a state interested only in winning.

Rowing made the cut, and fifty million East German marks (£12 million at 1977 rates) was pushed into the 1972 Olympiad. By then rowing was a reliable source of medals, and Grobler, aged 23 in 1969 when the Munich plans were laid, was still studying sports science at Leipzig. When he graduated in 1970, he went straight into a post as assistant coach in his hometown.

Dr Peter Schwanitz, who describes himself as a biomechanics specialist, came to know Grobler at that time in Berlin when Schwanitz was demonstrating boat testing at a training programme for elite coaches. Dr Theo Koerner, the head trainer of the East German rowing association DRSV, led the programme and promoted Grobler, enabling him and Sportclub Magdeburg to prosper.

Schwanitz says of Grobler today that he ‘was always very interested in the science of training’, science which encompassed all the specialisms that constitute a full understanding of how a human can move a boat over the required 2000 metres. Whenever a coach deconstructs a race, he or she will look at the split times for each quarter of the course and measure how these vary from perfectly even splits. In Munich, Hild’s race showed 102 seconds for the first 500, 109.7 seconds for the second, 114 seconds for the third and, in spite of the need for a final sprint, 115 seconds for the last 500. Alongside him, Wolfgang Güldenpfennig began more slowly at 103 seconds and gave away a further second (or one boat length in a single scull) to 1000 metres in under 111 seconds. He pulled all of Hild’s lead back to draw level at the 1500-metre mark in 112 seconds and left him wallowing in his wake in fourth place by covering the last 500 in fewer than 109 seconds.

Seen from the grandstand, Güldenpfennig held on to a place in the middle of the pack of scullers from the start and then sculled at a more even pace for the next three-quarters of the race, clocking successively 110, 112, 108.67 seconds for each 500 metres. Hild was quicker to the first and second marks before going progressively more slowly over the second half. While far from perfect, Güldenpfennig was demonstrating the superb endurance and racing nous that marked all the great East German crews of that era, and it was Grobler who had developed that ability in his 20-year-old club mate.

Hild’s race pattern of a quick first half followed by a slow second was standard practice for western nations, and even for other Eastern European states where full-time training should have resulted in greater endurance. The gold-medal winner in Munich, the Russian Yury Malyshev, took eleven seconds longer over the second half. The silver medallist Alberto Demiddi from Argentina was just over ten seconds slower and Hild, as we have seen, was seventeen seconds slower. Güldenpfennig dropped only 7.5 seconds.

Güldenpfennig’s preparation brought him far closer than everyone else to the even-paced splits ideal, and his trainer could claim some of the credit. However, the same pattern becomes evident when analysis is applied to all the East German medal-winning crews in Munich. The Germans were doing something consistently and well. The training programme designed by Dr Koerner was applied across all the performance centres. So Grobler would have started with a paper in his hand that told him exactly how much work was to be done, and at what pace, in each of thirteen sessions a week. The key was to equip him to test his charge on a daily basis to measure improvement and detect overtraining before it became apparent to anyone, including the athlete.

The East German trainers employed the ‘super-compensation cycle’, which is now universal. The athlete is pushed harder and harder for about six weeks of continuous training with no respite and builds up ‘residual fatigue’ so that the recovery between sessions is compromised. Then, when the bottom has been reached and the standard measures are well off the pace, the trainer’s foot is lifted from the pedal and light work is allowed for a number of days. The leap in recovery is marked by sharply improved measurements and, if the system is applied properly, the athlete soon rises above his previous best. Once the improvement is secured, the cycle is repeated with another sustained period of increasingly hard work until the bottom of the graph is reached again and the pressure is relieved to allow another rise, to a new peak.

Some of the East Germans were light years ahead of every other nation in the application of science to measure improvement and to detect decline in the performance of an individual in otherwise full health. This is the application of good science that Schwanitz recognised in Grobler. It was a safeguard against overtraining, and sometimes a complete collapse, that can result when a trainer uses unsophisticated measures to assess how deeply the hard work part of the cycle has bitten into the athlete’s performance, or if he is insensitive to a change in demeanour. Klaus Filter – who, as the leader of the team that developed the GDR fleet of competition boats, knew all the coaches – says that some of the Navy and Army coaches would measure only the number of strokes to the minute and number of kilometres covered to decide that the training had been successful. It was Grobler’s job to ensure that Magdeburg athletes were trained better and more wisely in order to beat the Navy and Army clubs by applying his sophisticated knowledge acquired at the university in Leipzig.

The other ingredient of training athletes better than any rivals was provision of support to enable them to accept the punishing regime. They were offered better accommodation in the high-performance centres than they would ever be likely to find at home. Their diet was enhanced well above the norm – the standard training of an international rower requires consumption of about 6500 calories a day for a man, in the proportion 50 per cent carbohydrates, 30 per cent fats and 20 per cent protein. These amounts were made available in SC Magdeburg, where Jürgen Grobler worked, by two club cooks with no one else to cater for.

Additionally, the scientists searched for any other medical cushion that would enable the bodies they trained to absorb more work without breaking down. In 1962 the East German state pharmacological research and development enterprise, Jenapharm, had isolated an anabolic steroid that it called Oral Turinabol. It was made available for therapeutic use in 1965. Within a year, testing for its effectiveness and for the appropriate dosage for athletes had begun. Once it was approved by the medical team it was made available to the coaches. It was the coaches’ decision, not the medical team’s, to use it to assist athletes. Men and, more controversially, women were dosed in time for the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Oral Turinabol – a synthetic version of testosterone, the hormone that is known to increase muscle mass and bone density – was the ‘little blue pill’ on the breakfast tray of all East Germans training in sports that require either explosive or endurance strength. The athletes had to be seen to take the pill by the coach. The pills could not be taken home or even out of the room because of the secrecy surrounding the whole programme. The pills were described as ‘support’ and the athletes were not told of their content. Indeed, most experiments involved a control group that took a blue placebo.

Güldenpfennig was in the programme and his training intensity would have taken account of the assistance given by the drug. Grobler understood – better than many of his less curious colleagues – what was in the blue pill and will have measured its benefit and reported his findings to the medical commission, run directly by Manfred Ewald, through the Sport Medical Service and its deputy director and chief physician. At the Mexico Olympics in 1968 when Grobler was still studying in Leipzig, testing of competitors for illegal doping was rudimentary and the list of banned substances was short and unsophisticated. Few were discovered to be abusing performance drugs, but the divisions of opinion around the ethical questions posed by their use were becoming clear. The rights and wrongs of this matter were the subject of every coaching and training conference.

Without doubt, the physiological effect of added testosterone and the methodology to establish the most beneficial dose will have been part of the curriculum that Grobler followed. The bulk of the research work at PhD level in the adaptation to sport of therapeutic drugs was carried out in the German College of Physical Culture in Leipzig. There, too, the research studied the damaging side effects and the point at which more damage than benefit was being felt, and when an athlete should be dropped from the programme.

The institute where Grobler was a student was the mothership of the East German sports doping programme, working to orders from the Politbüro. He and his classmates will not have been allowed to graduate without a deep understanding of the development of sports doping at that time. But, unlike almost every other person considering the problem elsewhere in the world, their freedom of expression, and even of thought, was strictly controlled. They had no choice. Even the option of a dignified resignation and exit from their career path was denied. If Grobler or any of his contemporaries had resigned over the state-sponsored doping regime, the quality of life for them and their families would have been compromised deeply and quickly. They could have been convicted and imprisoned for open conflict with the ‘vanguard of the people’ or its representative on earth, the Politbüro. More likely, they would have found that housing and work were denied them.

The authorities’ adverse reaction to a coach or athlete who bucked the system and refused the drugs is the explanation offered by Grobler himself on the few occasions when he has been challenged on his record of compliance with the regime. His mantra has been ‘You have to understand the system at that time. There was no room for disagreement.’

What is rarely admitted – probably because it sounds foolish to readers in a liberal western democracy – is that most of the population of East Germany were part of the collective consciousness expressed as ‘We are the state’. On the opening page of Das Rudern, the detailed rowing textbook published in 1977, the first paragraph ends:

‘The principal objectives of the sport of rowing in the GDR are: 1. The achievement of high performances in competitive rowing for men, women and youths, based on a wide membership, on a comprehensive and systematic basic training, and on a party and class-conscious education of the oarsman into a socialist sports personality.’

The third paragraph ends:

‘In addition, general or specific work in the sport of rowing is carried out in the German College of Physical Culture, in the various Sport Science Committees, in obligatory student sports, in schools, in the National People’s Army, and in the People’s Police, in agreement with the goals of the DRSV.’

These ‘socialist sports personalities’ were all willing and ‘conscious’ members of an elite in East German society that earned its privileges by working harder than anyone else to achieve the aims of the state in beating all contenders. They were the ‘vanguard of the people’ who represented the state abroad.

Already by 1972, only twenty-three years after the state came into existence and in only its second Olympic Games competing as a separate nation, the under-performance of its socialist economy was impossible to hide. For one thing, the Soviet Union had dismantled much of its satellite’s industry. For another, freedom of movement between East and West, difficult since 1945, was blocked completely in 1963 when the already robust frontier to the West was doubled in strength and the walled section through the divided city of Berlin was built. But during this Cold War, television had come to almost every household on both sides of the border, and so East Germans were reminded daily of the gulf in living standards.

In late August 1972 the sun shone on teams arriving in Munich and reflected off the revolutionary acrylic panels in the roof of the main stadium. Everything from the accommodation in the athlete village, to the U-Bahn underground system, to the rowing course at Oberschleißheim – built for the occasion at cost of DM7 million – seemed on the cutting edge of modernist architecture and design. It felt, and was, superior to any Olympic venue in the modern era. It pushed the boundaries of experience in the same way as, it was hoped, the competitions would push the boundaries of human physical achievement.

Into this showcase of expectation and glamour came a drably uniformed rowing team, picked not for their joy in taking part but for their probability of winning medals. There were seven events for men and none for women. A full team comprised twenty-six people, including three coxes. The East German team met the standard it had been set from above by winning a medal in each event. Güldenpfennig won bronze in the single sculls, while Hans-Joachim Böhmer and Hans-Ulrich Schmied also took bronze in the double sculls. East Germany won gold in the coxless pair with the youthful Siegfried Brietzke and Wolfgang Mager, and in the coxed pair with Wolfgang Gunkel and Jörg Lucke, steered by Klaus-Dieter Neubert. They won the coxless fours with arguably their best boat and most reliable medal bet, but lost the coxed fours to the West Germans who had put all their talent into the only boat they could see as a ‘banker’.

In the grand finale, the eights, East Germany’s young rowers, at the outset of their careers, were beaten into bronze-medal position by the reigning European champions New Zealand and by a surprise American crew in a photo finish. East Germany’s tally was three golds, one silver, and three bronzes. The next-best nation on the medal table, the Soviet Union, had two golds in the sculling events but nothing else. West Germany, New Zealand and Czechoslovakia had two medals each, and six nations had one apiece. GBR ranked 14th on the results table. Manfred Ewald and SED secretary Walter Ulbricht should have rejoiced at the result of their directives.

The team and its coaches were rewarded with a cruise to Cuba, the only resort that combined an exotic location with the minimum risk of escape. Even for champion swimmers, Florida was a long way off.

Jürgen Grobler had fulfilled his state-sanctioned quota when Güldenpfennig took a medal at the first international experience for either of them. Both had been outsiders for selection in the winter before, but were now recognised members of the team and would not be dislodged easily. Grobler told Michael Calvin, writing for The Independent in 2012, that ‘I know I cannot run away from my past… some things that were going on at that time might not have been correct, but I can look everybody in the eye and not feel guilty. I am not a doping coach. I am not a chemist.’ That comment might be true superficially but, once deconstructed, it looks disingenuous.

In the winter of 1971–2 Grobler and Güldenpfennig had pushed themselves into the front line of a demonstration of state power focused on winning Olympic medals. In their climb through the ranks they had pushed weaker men aside. The East German team for the 1971 European rowing championships in Copenhagen had seventeen names later selected for Munich.

There was no obligation on Grobler or Güldenpfennig to force their way into the national reckoning. They chose to put their names into the record book. They achieved it by doing the training better than their contemporaries and by embracing the system wilfully and willingly. They knew about the Oral Turinabol and knew its benefits. At no point in his denials has Grobler said, ‘We tried it and found that it did not work.’

When the doping issue became a subject for debate in the 1990s after the collapse of East Germany, Grobler at first said he did not know about it. When that became untenable he said that ‘some things that were going on at that time might not have been correct, but I can look everybody in the eye and not feel guilty.’ It is perfectly conceivable that he does not feel guilty and does not think of himself as ‘a doping coach’ or a ‘chemist’. In the morality of that place and time he did no wrong. The list of drugs that were banned was short and badly defined. There were wide pharmacological roads around most of the bans. When Oral Turinabol was given to athletes it was proven to be extremely stable and in a therapeutic setting it had high safety ratings. It was effective in building lean muscle and bone mass. It was perfect for their purposes and it had two other qualities essential for the East German Olympic programme: it could be matched with epitestosterone to mask the evidence that the extra testosterone was synthetic, and it would be flushed out of the athlete’s body in a short time after the dose was stopped.

However, doping played only a small part in Grobler’s application of the best science flowing from the German College of Physical Culture in Leipzig and elsewhere. The East German team used boats built beside the River Spree in Berlin using a hull profile that was unique at that time. It was designed to have the lowest wetted area – that is, the amount of skin in contact with the water – to reduce the friction or drag. It was designed to pitch and yaw less as the oarsmen moved their weight back and forth on the runners of their sliding seats. It had enough stiffness not to wallow as the weight within it shifted, but was flexible enough to absorb much of the counterforce of rough water to minimise slow-down.

Up to this point, individual boat yards had modified existing designs to seek incremental improvements. They had been subject to fashion but not much hydrological research. The East Germans went about it with legendary thoroughness and seemingly unlimited financial resources. The naval architect who bossed the programme from the start, Klaus Filter, had started rowing at sixteen in Berlin when he began an apprenticeship with the racing-boat builder, Friedrich Pirsch. As his rowing and sculling improved he was steered in the direction of the newly empowered College of Physical Culture in Leipzig ‘to fill his time while in training’. After graduation he went back to work at Pirsch. By the mid-Sixties he was obliged to look for new materials to build the fine shells because East Germany was finding it difficult to import the South American cedars which were then deemed the only material combining strength and flexibility in appropriate measures. The East German state aircraft manufacturer, EFW, had been put out of business in 1961 – probably as a result of Russian interference – and its facilities were made available to the burgeoning sports-equipment research programme.

Filter was able to start experiments with light and strong plastic ‘sandwich’ materials and in his thirties he decided to enhance his boat-building skills by taking a two-year naval architecture course at the university in Rostock. From that he began developing boat designs from first principles. Theoretically they were the fastest built, but they were impossible to row. The means to a solution for the ‘perfect design’ versus ‘practical for humans to row’ was ready-made because rowing as a national sport was already functioning in all its aspects through a committee of the leading coaches, training scientists, experts in biomechanics, medical men, with Filter heading up the technology side with boat designs and materials. Filter says Grobler was, from the beginning, an authoritative voice who understood that collaboration with the other key elements would bring the results the state required.

Biomechanical work with athletes, combined with Filter’s hull dynamics, was crucial in developing the style of rowing which obtained the best out of boats and men. East German crews rowed a long arc by curving the back forwards to enable the arms to reach a long way forward without unduly compressing the legs onto the foot-stretcher that is fixed to the hull. The boat is then levered past the point where the blades are locked into the water. The large flat area of the blade prevents it being torn through the water while the boat is drawn past the lock point by the strength and skill of the oarsman. This rowing style places more strain on the lower back muscles than could be borne by many western oarsmen who trained under a shorter but more intense regime. The East German coaches had full-time professional athletes and so could indulge themselves with long sessions at less intense pressure. They could develop the lower-back strength slowly and carefully over time. The bodies, the style and the boats were each designed for maximum compatibility. Filter, assisted by Grobler, was working to perfect the knowledge of the amount of flex and best hull shape for the boat to match the reaction time of the athletes. If the boat rolls, the rowers must adjust their weight and application of power to match. If the reaction is too slow the roll becomes worse and the boat speed is impaired. The task at which they excelled was to match training to boat shape so as to produce the style of propulsion desired to cover the endurance distance of 2000 metres. It was not a sprint: Grobler and Filter succeeded in developing a type of training that matched athletes and their boats to the distance.

In 1972 Güldenpfennig was given a boat with a plastic laminate hull, finished in soon-to-be-ubiquitous Wehrmacht grey, fitted with a wooden seat and washboards. It was the latest development. Götz Draeger, the man he replaced, had won silver in the European championships in Copenhagen in 1971 in a wooden shell, along with all his teammates. Film of the final in Munich shows Güldenpfennig sculling in the same style as the sweep oarsmen, using his curved back and outstretched arms at the start of the stroke to place the blades in the water as far forward as possible.

The ironies of East Germany’s dominance of Olympic rowing in Munich were many. The original award of the Games to the Bavarian capital by the International Olympic Committee had given immense satisfaction to its president, Avery Brundage. Brundage had risen from poverty on Chicago’s east side to own the largest construction group in the city and to forge a dominant role in US athletics. He had one obsession, which was a hatred of communism and communists, and one closeted dislike, which was for Jews. To hold the Games in a state that shared a long, walled-off border with a communist one must have pleased him.

Munich’s organising committee rose so high to meet the expectations of the Olympic family that hubris was almost certainly heading for a fall. From the start, the Soviet Union and East Germany were winning half as many golds again, with fewer athletes between them, than the United States and West Germany combined. Then on 5 September, early in the second week, came the devastating hostage-taking and murder of thirteen members of the Israeli team by Black September terrorists. The East German rowers were not there to see the shaming of the West German security services in their botched response to the crisis. They had been sent home immediately after their medal ceremonies to avoid western temptations in general and defection in particular.

Brundage, aged 85, who was due to retire as president of the IOC at the end of the Games, spoke at the hugely moving memorial service in the main stadium on the following day. He said that the ‘Games must go on’ and was applauded warmly. But some later revised their opinion after noting Brundage’s deemed hostility to Judaism had been particularly evident in his support for US participation in the Berlin Games of 1936.

The circumstances of Munich’s embarrassment left the East German leadership enjoying a moment of schadenfreude. Although beaten by two scullers, both of whom could be described as idiosyncratic and brilliant, Grobler’s protégé, Güldenpfennig, was a great example of a socialist team ethic. He had only himself to rely on in his races, but he was shaped in the classic East German mould, an interchangeable cog in a bigger machine. He would race the single again in 1973, with the same bronze-medal result, but thereafter he moved into the quadruple-sculls event, introduced to the programme at the 1974 world rowing championships and won by East Germans every year without interruption until 1993.

Jürgen Grobler was hitched to this star and accompanied him, as coach of the quadruple scull, to his first Olympic gold in Montreal in 1976.