British Rowing Secures a Return on Investment
24 hours is a long time in sport. A day after the Olympic Regatta came to an end in Tokyo, there was outrage that British Rowing had supposedly wasted £24m of funding. The 2020 Olympics was the first time since 1984 that the team had not won a gold medal. It resulted in a slump to 14th place on the medal table for the rowers. In the eyes of the public, compared to BMX, Rowing had failed and as a result, the Performance Director walked.
Can't help but get angry that British rowing (with its public school associations) gets £25m funding from UK Sport, and have massively underperformed, but a gold medal winning working class BMX rider from Essex had to crowd fund herself.
— Joe Scaramanga (@ScaramangaJoe) July 30, 2021
Fast forward one year and the performances at the World Rowing Championships in Račice, Czech Republic could not be a greater contrast. The British team has returned to dominating standards the country has come to expect. They will return home with seven gold, one silver and four bronze medals. In the aftermath of the biggest test since Tokyo, there has rightly been a huge amount of admiration for the whole team.
Three key things have happened to allow this transformation to take place. The first is the elevation of an outstanding U23 squad to step up into the senior spotlight. At recent World Championships, the U23s have produced consistent excellence, winning at least one gold every year since 2016 and finishing no lower than third on the medal table since 2017. This group of athletes have grown up knowing success and what it feels like to be a World Champion, something that very few senior athletes felt during the years leading up to the Tokyo Olympics.
Secondly, the squad now contains a vast amount of experience . 20% of athletes returned to the National Training Centre six years ago and the vast majority of the squad that struggled in Tokyo are back in search of redemption. Experience wins gold medals. In 2017, it should not have come as a surprise that the team struggled to perform at the World Championships in Sarasota with so many of them racing at the highest level for the first time. Fast forward six years and with an extra year training together, this squad is producing results far greater than the sum of its parts, displaying depth that no other nation can come close to.
Finally, British Rowing has taken the time to put in place a coaching team that will drive the squad towards Paris. Appointments of Louise Kingsley as Director of Performance, Andrew Randell and Paul Stannard as Women’s and Men’s Olympic Head Coaches respectively, combined with the return of the German, Christian Felkel, makes for an impressive line-up.
British Rowing took too long to wipe the slate clean after the departure of Chief Coach, Jürgen Gröbler. The German was instrumental to their success since his arrival in 1991. Moving on from Gröbler was a decision that was questioned continuously up to and after the Tokyo Games. Since the coaching positions were finalised back in February, Britain’s top rowers have been training in a system that is designed to set them up for success.
British Rowing cannot afford a repeat of the results in Tokyo. It will need to defend the large price tag that success and failure comes with. The 2022 World Championships proves that one of Britain’s most reliable Olympic medal factories is fully operational once more and showing no signs of slowing down.
