‘Science, stopwatch, and a bit of art’: GB rowers’ mission to rekindle magic

It is a bright, chilly morning on the Redgrave Pinsent rowing lake near Caversham as, one stroke at a time, the UK’s elite rowers start to put some clear water between themselves and their disappointing performance at the Tokyo Olympics. For the first time since Moscow in 1980, an era so remote that East Germany topped the medals table on the lake, Team GB’s rowers returned home without winning one of the 14 golds on offer. Nearly £25m of mostly lottery-based funding sent 41 rowers to Japan, more than any other nation in the competition, and a silver and a bronze were all they had to show for it.

The bronze came in the men’s eight, on 30 July 2021, the final event of the regatta. It was the same day Beth Shriever, who was forced to raise £50,000 via crowdfunding to qualify for Tokyo after UK Sport initially decided not to support her, won gold in the BMX. It was also the day Josh Bugajski, one of the eight, launched a stinging attack on the legendary former coach Jürgen Gröbler, who left the programme abruptly in August 2020, describing him as someone who “destroys the souls” of some of his athletes.

It is against this backdrop of disappointment and recrimination, and a budget cut to about £22m, that British Rowing has set out on the short three-year cycle that leads to Paris in 2024. It needs to identify what went wrong in Tokyo and find solutions. And also what went right, as a foundation for rebuilding. There are new names and a fresh approach in many of the senior coaching roles, while the rolling process of team-building has brought some promising young rowers into the programme to replace veterans who have left.

Between them, they will put in untold thousands of hours of work on the road from Caversham to Paris,