AUSTRALIA
St Patrick’s College, where Chris would later be schooled, then in turn coach. “I was really just a schoolboy rower and a club hack. It wasn’t until I got into coaching that I knew that’s what I wanted to do.” For his part, Kevin is now 83 and is still
pottering about with rowing, although confesses he can be “a bit difficult to get along with”, particularly when it comes to school principals. Kevin coaches a small squad of teenaged girls with a focus on single sculls, and also speaks proudly of an athlete he has coached who has multiple sclerosis and was just selected to row in Boston at the Head of the Charles. Kevin – who comes across as a bit of a larrikin – describes his son as a “100-per- center and a straight shooter”. He also says with a distinct cheekiness that Chris learnt everything he knows from his dad, but “is much more intelligent”. “Most of my kids were so young the
first time they were in a boat that they can’t remember it. I put Chris in a single before his legs were long enough to reach the foot chocks,” Kevin recalls. Chris moved from Ballarat to Melbourne to take his coaching career more seriously. He joined the rowing powerhouse of Melbourne University Boat Club, where he volunteered as a coach whilst studying part-time. “When I started we had no employed
staff. Ultimately we would have two paid coaches running programmes. It was a different way of doing things. We had to look for the opportunities on how to move forward,” he recalls. It was in Melbourne that O’Brien met
Drew Ginn. Ginn has, to date, been the more
renowned of the duo and it’s difficult to reflect on O’Brien’s career without simultaneously considering the sporting success of Ginn. Ginn took a seat in the high-profile “Oarsome Foursome” crew after it first won gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, then went on to win medals under O’Brien’s careful watch at three consecutive Games. With the success, of course, came an increased profile: Ginn is perhaps remembered in the non- rowing community for featuring with his crewmates in a series of kitschy preserved fruit commercials.
78 Ginn is now head coach of the
Australian team, so the pair continue to work closely. He speaks fondly of Chris, who he calls by a well-used nickname, “Cobba”. The words tumbling out in his trademark rapid-fire speech pattern, Ginn says: “I met Cobba back in 2002, so I’ve really seen him develop as a coach – at the same time I was developing as an athlete. He wasn’t intimidated by the opportunity to take responsibility for key athletes like James (Tompkins) and myself. As a coach he works it out his own way and has his own style. He is a great filter for all that goes on around us athletes. He can be a bit hard to get to know at the start but once you develop the connection with him, he’s a very loyal person and what he is good at is bringing together small groups of people to help them achieve – he lets them do what they do rather than dictate terms. “Chris is very understanding and he
listens to his athletes. He has a unique skill set from his teaching career and understands the finances, the economics and the people sides of the role pretty well.”
Ginn has been a prolific publisher on the subject of rowing, through his Rudderfish blog and YouTube channel, although the posts have dropped off a little since he took up the head coach position. Perhaps his most popular work is a video entitled “Will it make the boat go faster” which highlights an almost lazy action at the finish and more relaxed slide speed. From O’Brien’s perspective, access
to coaching tools like Ginn’s videos and even former Olympic single sculling champion Xeno Muller’s online coaching programme are useful, but can only take athletes so far. “A bit of information can be both
powerful and dangerous. There is a lot of information out there and a lot of stuff to watch. I guess it’s about mimicry. It’s one thing to mimic and another to understand it. Mimicry will get you so far but it’s about having the understanding of how to make a boat move faster,” he says. “You only have to look at one race
at one World Championships to see how differently boat speed can be achieved. Obviously there are things that are common, but there are significant differences as well. I think of the 2000
He can be a bit hard to get to know at the start, but once you develop the connection with him, he’s a very
loyal person. DREW GINN
Olympic games as a great example in the women’s single. We had Karsten (Ekaterina, BLR), Neykova (Rumyana, BUL) and Rutschow-Stomporowski (Katrin, GER), three single-scullers who finished less than a second apart, yet their rowing styles and boat set-up were all so different.” The race was won by Karsten by just
0.01 of a second. Judges deliberated for 20 minutes before awarding the medal. Karsten this year competed at the European Rowing Championships in Belgrade in the quad scull, and will be 44 if she takes on an event at Rio. The women’s single scull continues to
display diverse yet fierce competition: the vastly different rowing strategies of New Zealand’s fast-finishing Emma Twigg and Australia’s golden girl, Kim Crow, have kept spectators on edge. Twigg took out their first battle at the 2014 World Cup regatta in Sydney, and the two antipodean Valkyries are set to go head- to-head again at Lucerne in July. Crow is currently one of the world’s
fastest women on the water after she exceeded expectations when qualifying for the women’s single scull in the lead- up to the London Olympics, where she historically won a medal in two separate events – bronze in the single and silver in the double. Crow was reportedly lured to leave athletics and try her hand at rowing by O’Brien himself. Women’s rowing is something O’Brien
notes is changing at a rapid rate both in Australia and around the world. The team
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