The elegant old ski resort of St Moritz has hosted its share of winter Olympians down the years, but not many oarsmen. Yet this is becoming familiar territory for the British men’s rowing squad, who migrate annually to the Swiss Alps to cleanse their souls for the new season and master the delicate art of cross-country skiing, not easy for 15Åst of well-muscled athlete. On Thursday night, temperatures in the Engadin Valley sank to minus 17 degrees. Cars froze, breath too. Warm weather training this is not.
“The strange thing is that the qualities which make world champions come out in skiing the same as rowing,” says Jurgen Grobler, head coach of the men’s squad. “To go fast on snow, you have to be very sensitive with the movements, to have good balance and rhythm, similar things to rowing. They pick it up pretty quickly, but it’s good for them to do a sport they’re maybe not so good at in the beginning.”
More subtle forces are at work too, designed to integrate newcomers and ensure that the success of the top boat, the Camelot-sponsored coxless four of Andy Hodge, Alex Partridge, Peter Reed and Steve Williams, world champions in Japan last year, rubs off on the rest. Team-building is as much a focus for the 10 days as the endurance training gained from cross-country skiing.
“It’s a good way of remembering how to learn,” says Reed. “Here we’ve not got any bad habits, we’re starting from scratch, at least I am, so when you go back to rowing, you remember coaches are trying to help. It also breaks down barriers, you end up skiing with people of equal speed, not guys in the same crew. It’s an opportunity to get to know everyone.”
The more experienced skiers are encouraged to help the novices and nobody is spared the tongue-lashings of Bernie Shrosbree, former marine, fitness expert and professional hard man. If two-hour hikes through the woods have not concentrated the minds enough, afternoons in the gym and evenings on the ergo, the indoor rowing machine, reinforce the message. The new year, the year that Britain hosts its first world championships, starts here. “This is where the real work is done,” Grobler explains. “We’ve pushed quite hard before Christmas to match their personal bests and now is the time to settle things through to March, ready to take the next step. It’s also a good time to talk to the athletes and lay out some goals for the season.”
For Grobler and the four, last season was a journey into the unknown. Grobler needed to know if he could continue the thread of unbroken success from the Redgrave years without the eight-litre lung capacity of Matthew Pinsent and the competitive aggression of James Cracknell; the new four, with only Williams surviving from Athens, needed to establish their own identity under pressure from the past.
By ending the year as unbeaten world champions, the coxless four answered both questions emphatically. The ambition now is to repeat the dominance through the dangerous second season, when rival coaches know what to expect and signs of weakness will be ruthlessly exposed. “Having the world championships at home (at Dorney Lake near Eton in August) will bring people a lot closer to us,” Grobler says. “We’d like to show British rowing off in the best way. I am feeling the pressure myself.”
Out on the snow, Reed, in his own words, is “stumbling about like a newborn foal” and Shrosbree is laying down one or two basic ground rules. “You can,” he says, “ski around in circles and have a bit of fun or you can work really hard at technique and learn.” Actually, he put it more industrially than that, but the drift was clear. Out of earshot, Shrosbree is more complimentary about athletes he regards as a benchmark for hard work and discipline. He would like to gather a few other athletes from more pampered sports, he says, to see how medals are truly won and lost.
“What I like about them is that their chins are never down,” he says. “You can drive these guys to the limit and you won’t find them chuntering. They get on with it and with the right attitude. It’s a question of, ‘I’m knackered, but if we don’t do this, we won’t win a medal’. You don’t have to tell them that all the time. Tomorrow, they’re skiing at 2.30, after doing weights and a session on the ergo. Morale will be low, but they’ll keep going. On Monday, we’ve got a three-hour ski to the glacier.” Stretch the elastic, as Grobler says.
Only three of the world championship four had made it to St Moritz for the opening day of the training camp. Williams joined them at the weekend after recovering from flu. Last season’s triumphs have been consigned to the video recorder and the memory, to be replayed only in hours of real doubt. Grobler’s success as a coach — his crews have won gold at every Olympic Games since 1972 — has been built on a religious refusal to be drawn into complacency. No sooner had the last stroke been rowed in Japan last September than Grobler was planning the schedule for the season ahead.
The crew was allowed three weeks off, then it was back to work, with only two days break over Christmas to recharge the batteries.
“Jurgen wants to find your breaking point and then train you to within an inch of that, to the point where your brain is crying out for mercy,” explains Hodge, who has inherited more than just a stroke seat. In setting a British record for a peculiar form of torture known as the “half-hour”, a straight, no-holds-barred burn-out on the ergo, widely revered in the world of rowing as the ultimate physical test, Hodge has marked himself out as the natural heir to Pinsent.
Moments before last year’s world championship, Hodge quietly told his teammates that he was about to row the hardest race of his life. The significant point was not Hodge’s statement, but the response it triggered from the rest of the crew. After 500m, Reed knew for sure that this was no idle boast. By the time the challenge of a crack Dutch four had been comfortably repelled, the rest of the field knew it too. There was a stamp of authority about the performance that was depressingly familiar to the losers.
Now, high in the Swiss Alps, the four are gathering themselves for another arduous year. “Last year, this camp was a key thing,” Grobler says. “It was post-Olympic year and we had lost so many big figures. The only successful athlete was Steve Williams. So it was a good time to say, ‘Look, guys, we have to do something different’. In the past, there was a sense that everybody could win with Matthew, everybody could win with Steve. So it was a big challenge for me, the coaches and the guys to develop a new team.
“Okay, so the four won the world championships. At Christmas, I was still talking about ‘next year’. Now it’s this year and we have to do it again. That’s the biggest challenge.”
This year could also see the return of one of Grobler’s “big heroes” in James Cracknell, who will make a decision on his rowing future when he has finished the Atlantic Rowing Challenge. They have already talked about it. “I’ve told him I want him back,” says Grobler. “But I’ve also told him that he has to queue like the rest. He knows that. His life has moved on and his personality has developed. What I do know is that if he says, ‘Yes’, he means, ‘Yes’. But it has to be his decision.”
The chemistry, were Cracknell to commit himself to another Olympics, would be potentially combustible. Cracknell would want to be in the top boat, the boat with the best chance of winning gold in Beijing in 2008. For everybody in the British men’s rowing squad in St Moritz last week, that is the only mountain top.
