Martin Cross asks Jurgen Grobler about UK Sport, Performance Targets and Athlete Welfare (2021)

Martin Cross interviewed Jurgen Grobler as part of the 2021 Rowers Conference. It was the first time Jurgen had spoken at length in public following his departure from the Great Britain Rowing Team in August 2020.
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[@typxxilps]

Where does athlete welfare start and end ?
In rowing as a tough sport outside in every weather condition you as a coach has to balance the personal situation of each crew member into the crews direction one way or the other and you also have to make sharp cuts if you need to exchange one by another one.
But that has to be done after performance has been shown otherwise you will not get the excellence needed to perform on international level which developes pretty fast recently. Many nations have made huge leaps and arrived on the top medal positions that had not seen before. Why?
Unique athletes had been trained by unique and the right coaches in the right way to compete in their boat class successfully. So we have a lot higher density in competition, remember the big Mens single races of the last 3 years we all loved to see cause every time we had a question can Zeidler been beat, by whom and why did he loose this time. All these races down to the line with 3 boats or even more in just 1 second. We had not seen that before.
And now we have a former lightweight rower as GOLD medaillist in the mens single that seems to had come out of nowhere like that young italian. Remember: before 2016 Rio final we had not such close finishes seen before cause Mahe had won everything and the only race to the line was that in Eaton 2007 where Hacker attacked like Damir Martin but also finally lost by a fraction of a second. Now we have 3 to 5 rowers that can do that like Sverri, Kjetil, Damir, Olli and the new greek and italian one.
High density.
And the german situation is far worser cause they had gotten a TV coverage over the past 24 months via x-scull format, but nothing was achieved, the worst M2x and M4x performances ever and the head coach told last year that he had gotten worser "stuff" than before and could not deliver better results therefore. He should have been fired back then, not for the topic but the words he used and blamed the athletes for not being competitive enough. Just a tiny reminder most outside usually did not know: Before 2017 german athletes trained at home and met for trainings camps with their crews except the german eight, which had been centralized. Now after 4 or 5 year of full centralisation the results are the worst, Schmidla announced retirement when she was forced to move to Berlin for the german female scullers.
And the german rowing team will now loose a huge amount of federal funding due to poor performance at the olympics cause other sports are a lot cheaper to fund and perform better. I hope we will see a tough brake, a lot of coaches need to be fired and new ones have to rush in cause it needs strong improvements within 2 years till qualification for Paris will start. You can not wait. Would be wonderfull to see Jürgen coming home and make that turnaround happen he had done with the british rowing team.
But I guess a lot of these very traditional german rowing sports representatives will deal that out in hidden rooms and discussions and avoid to invite him and offer him a position we call Generalstabskommando in the military. But that is what is needed and Grobler is highly admired and respected by germany athletes nowadays and of the past 3 decades.

[@izzieday8992]

I don’t know if centralisation is the problem, it has its challenges, but look at Australia and NZ. This is the first cycle they have been centralised and it has been a key part in those two high achieving programs. Not the only factor but certainly a factor!