Jurgen Grobler was given a lifetime achievement award by the UK Coaching Foundation this month and then listened as Sir Clive Woodward talked of the Pinsent-Redgrave model for winning.

What Woodward meant was that developing the individual came before building the team, which has always been Grobler’s way. “You can’t win in heavyweight rowing with half-size guys,” as Grobler says. Nor international rugby, for that matter.

Grobler, 58, and with a haul of 15 Olympic golds to his name, first with the former East Germany and since 1991 as head coach of the British men’s rowing squad, was flattered by the citation, but as awards have been showered on the coxless four that he guided to gold in Athens, and, even more embarrassingly, on his own head, his urge to return to the shadows with his stopwatch and clipboard has become acute.

Beijing is three years and eight months away — and counting. Life without Sir Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent will be hard enough without giving the others a head start.

It is partly his own fault. British rowing has become a precious oasis of excellence in the past two decades, and with the world championships coming to Dorney Lake near Windsor in 2006, there will be no compromise in national expectations. When whispers of a job with the Chinese Rowing Federation reached his ears, Grobler must have been tempted to leave on an unprecedented high and let somebody else pick up the pieces of a squad that is deprived, for a year at least, of another natural leader in James Cracknell.

Already sure that Pinsent would retire, however, Grobler had decided well before Athens that he would stay to rebuild the squad for Beijing. “I am not a guy playing games,” he insists, which says something about his love of a challenge, even more about the depth of his integration into the peculiar ways of British sport.

To understand the bond, you have to imagine Grobler arriving at the door of the Leander Club one morning in January 1990 to find a river, a boathouse and a structure that somebody said was the gym but which looked like a garden shed. His hometown rowing club in Magdeburg had looked much the same in the early Seventies; when he left, it boasted a hotel and a high- performance training centre. He wondered if he really had the energy to repeat the transformation in a strange land where rowers wore blazers and Olympic athletes had to pay for their own training camps.

For the first three months, he lived in the narrow confines of the old club itself with his wife, Angela, and their 10-year-old son, Bjorn. Hardly the bright new horizons promised by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Grobler’s heroes were strapping young men identified at birth and fast-tracked through one of the most efficient and subsequently most discredited systems in world sport. Here, natural talent was the key; toast and marmalade the diet of champions. Was this really the home of gold medallists? “I felt in one way as if I had gone backwards,” he reflects. “But the people really loved their sport. Talented people in the GDR (East Germany) were privileged. You maybe got a car or a flat in a year, not 10 years. In the schools you had good accommodation and five meals a day. Everything was provided. Here, they had to work for what they had.”

Then came another shock. Grobler knew Redgrave already, and there was news of a massive ruddy-faced young Englishman called Matthew. But Jonny Searle, who won gold in the coxed pairs in Barcelona with younger brother Greg, was an athlete beyond his experience. Strength, power, endurance, those were the keys to moving a rowing boat fast in Grobler’s mind. Jonny Searle possessed none of those qualities.

“In all the testing we did, Jonny’s name was never on the first page,” Grobler recalls. “In fact, it was on the second-last page. His data didn’t look good, but in competition, how tough was he, always finding an extra gear. That was great. That changed my thinking a lot. I rely in the first place on my scientific background and my data. That principle, I think, is right. Then you watch out very carefully for what doesn’t fit in the picture.”

Grobler was brought up near Magdeburg, an industrial town west of Berlin that was flattened in the second world war. His father, an architect, helped to build the new town. His mother’s side of the family owned a farm where Jurgen spent most of his summers. His two brothers were academically gifted; one is now a medical doctor, the other a doctor of physics, and neither has moved far from the family roots. Grobler’s passion for sport took him to the country’s leading sports science university in Leipzig; by 1970, he was back in Magdeburg as assistant coach to the town’s rowing club, two years later coaching the double scull to a bronze medal at the Munich Games, the first ever won by the club.

By the time he moved to Berlin to become the youngest coach in the East German rowing programme in 1980, Magdeburg had become a major force in the development of the country’s rowing, and Grobler was a rising star in a rigidly controlled firmament.