Britain's boat team has worst Olympic result for 50 years after Jürgen ...

Britain's boat team has worst Olympic result for 50 years after Jürgen ...
Britain's boat team has worst Olympic result for 50 years after Jürgen ...

At 2am on the champagne-fuelled night in 2000 when Matthew Pinsent arrived from Sydney, where his coxless four had won Olympic gold in what the party’s host (and then Henley MP) Boris Johnson dubbed ‘the greatest British aquatic triumph since Trafalgar’, he felt an urgent tap on the shoulder.

It was the British team’s coach, Jürgen Gröbler, and he had an important message to share.

He didn’t want to say ‘well done!’ or ‘congratulations!’ or any of the usual platitudes that greet a famous victory.

Instead, he frowned slightly, shook his head and muttered: ‘Matt, we should have won by more.’

Gröbler, now 74, is a relentless taskmaster in the Alex Ferguson mould, who always wants and demands more from his athletes and is rarely, if ever, entirely happy

Gröbler, now 74, is a relentless taskmaster in the Alex Ferguson mould, who always wants and demands more from his athletes and is rarely, if ever, entirely happy

This single incident highlights everything you need to know about the extraordinary German who led the UK’s rowers to seven consecutive Olympics, from 1992-2016, producing 20 champions who won 33 gold medals, and turning our national team into the greatest force in the gruelling sport’s long history.

Gröbler, now 74, is a relentless taskmaster in the Alex Ferguson mould, who always wants and demands more from his athletes and is rarely, if ever, entirely happy.

His notorious training camps in Spain’s hot and remote Sierra Nevada region see rowers pushed to the limits of human endurance, working out until they vomit.

Athletes who under-perform are ruthlessly dropped. Team members must commit to rigorous regimes with little time off, even for holidays or family events. Nothing is ever allowed to get in the way of winning.

This singular devotion may not always be pretty, but it gets extraordinary results. It saw Britain take five rowing medals in Rio, six in Beijing, and nine at the London games, topping the Olympic regatta table each time. In pure sporting terms, it was a triumph.

Then, suddenly, he was gone.

Last August, in a shock announcement, it was revealed that the world’s most famous rowing coach had parted company with his employer – in mysterious circumstances – and would not be running the British team as they prepared for the delayed 2021 games in Tokyo.

Eleven months later and, well, we all now know how that worked out.

Despite being the world’s best-funded team, which has chewed through nearly £25million in the last Olympic cycle, the Gröbler-less Brits have earned a paltry two medals, neither of which is gold.

A string of near-misses (we had six boats in fourth place) and silly mistakes (the coxless four’s bow man momentarily forgot to steer) contributed to Team GB’s worst rowing performance since they came home from Munich with nothing, some fifty years ago.

Those are the bare facts. Yet behind this sporting debacle lies a furious debate that now touches on one of the most contentious issues in sport.

It revolves around the following question: are highly-successful coaches who, like Gröbler, have a reputation for pursuing victory at almost any cost simultaneously placing an intolerable (and unacceptable) strain on the young athletes in their care?

The tension at the heart of this conflict became dramatically public this week when Josh Bugajski, one of the crew who won bronze in the men’s eight, told an interviewer that he’d ‘cracked open a bottle of champagne when Jürgen retired’.

‘I had a very dark three years under him,’ Bugajski continued. ‘I will admit, he’s a good coach to some people. But there were some people he just seemed to take a disliking to. What he did to them was just destroy them – destroy their soul, destroy everything they had.’

(Left to right) Matthew Pinsent, Tim Foster, Steve Redgrave and James Cracknell of Great Britain win gold in the Mens Coxless Fours final during the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games

(Left to right) Matthew Pinsent, Tim Foster, Steve Redgrave and James Cracknell of Great Britain win gold in the Mens Coxless Fours final

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