COMRADE IGOR AND THE OARSMEN OF THE OCCOQUAN : ATHLETES IN A CLASSIC BUT OBSCURE SPORT TURN TO A SOVIET COACH TO MINE GOLD

IGOR GRINKO ARRIVED IN Washington last December by way of Kiev. The official reason for his visit was to teach a three-day clinic at the United States Rowing Assn.’s annual convention. In reality, Grinko’s clinic will last 20 months, through the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games and possibly beyond. Yes, it has come to this: Americans have hired a Soviet to help them win some gold.

During one of his first days here, Grinko was taken to the Potomac Boat Club to meet Alison Townley, one of this country’s top scullers. He watched her row on an “erg”--a rowing machine--for a few minutes; then, deciding she wasn’t working hard enough, he waved his arms, trying to make himself understood. Finally, in frustration, he took out his Russian/English dictionary, thumbed through it until he found the word he wanted and then shouted: “Suffer!” Six months and a few thousand exhortations later, it still ranks among his favorite words.

In the past decade, American champions in this beautiful but recondite sport have been in short supply. Since 1985, only two U.S. men’s sculling boats have made the Olympic or world-championship finals (the top six). A single sculler finished sixth at the Seoul Olympics, and a double-scull team finished fourth at the 1990 World Rowing Championships. Since the quadruple-scull event was added to the Olympics in 1976, an American men’s quad scull has made the finals only once, in 1976; the best finish was fifth place at the ’79 world championships. The women have done slightly better: Since 1985, there have been one quad, four double-scull and four single-scull finalists.

After a long look at this sorry state, the USRA cried enough! and came up with a straightforward strategy to turn around American sculling. Months of research, deep reflection and countless conference calls led the association to borrow a page from the professional sports handbook’s Rule No. 2: If you can’t beat them, hire their coach. (Rule No. 1: Hire their athletes.) In a revolutionary attempt to improve the performance of our scullers, the USRA hired Grinko as its full-time national-team sculling coach. His services were had at a bargain price of about $40,000 a year, roughly the same as four games on the Bo Jackson $10,000-per-Game Bonus Plan.

To help Grinko succeed, the association is trying another radical idea. A training center was created especially for sculling on the Occoquan Reservoir in Virginia, a secluded stretch of water about 15 miles from Washington. Jim Dietz, the 1988 Olympic sculling coach and himself a champion sculler, says it’s a step in the right direction.

“Anyone who has the situation that he has, within four to six years, is going to produce something good, because in the past we’ve never had a coach delegated that far in advance--where he can have his own boathouse, where he can bring his guys in to train, use his own systematic approach, bring them up all the time. That’s the only way you can do it. You just can’t get together a month before the Olympics and put together a boat. It just doesn’t work.” So American sculling now joins an elite group of Olympic sports that also have year-round training facilities--volleyball in San Diego, baseball in Memphis and yachting in Miami.

Rowing is a singular sport. It’s antiquated, completely without real-world purpose, and yet the practitioners are as devoted to it as religious converts. If you’ve ever seen the Thomas Eakins painting “John Biglin in a Single Scull,” which shows a man in a white jersey and a red bandanna rowing up Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, then you know what the sport is all about. The oars act as levers, prying the boat through the water; the force driving the oars comes from the legs, back and arms, in that order of importance. The premiere rowing muscle is the heart: a rower must have heart, a strong, flawless pump that will keep legs firing the whole 2,000 meters--a mile-and-a-quarter, the Olympic distance--for maybe seven minutes of continuous, maximum, full-tilt effort in a single scull. Passing out at the finish line, although rare, is greatly respected among rowers.

Timeless Rowing Reward No.1: You can eat like Roseanne Barr and still look like Sylvester Stallone.

Driving up to the Occoquan boathouse, one looks for a sign, a placard, any indication that the boathouse is near. Nothing. The clerk at the local liquor store has never heard of it. Anonymity is the privilege of rowers.

According to rowing lore, Soviet rowers were given an ax, pointed in the direction of the forest and told to make their own oars. When Grinko first arrived in Occoquan, his training center consisted of an empty, unheated, un-air-conditioned room, 100 feet long and 15 feet wide, without plumbing. Using 2-by-6s, half-inch plywood and drywall screws from the local lumberyard, Grinko made all manner of primitive but effective weightlifting equipment--bench row, back swings, squat racks, upright rowing machines, pullup bars. “Only two weeks ago get showers,” he says.

Grinko likes to compare Soviet and American athletes. All training for rowing can be thought of in terms of a pyramid, with the base consisting of LSD Training--Long, Slow Distance--working on technique and endurance. Toward the top of the pyramid is sprint work for speed. The end result is, supposedly, the perfect blend. “Americans, too small base,” Grinko says. “Very often, building breaks. Soviet Union is other way. Often very big base, but no building. Many, many training (sessions). Long training. No speed. Soviet Union, prepare, prepare, prepare, prepare--no try for speed. If you want good results, you must work. But you must work smart. You want gold medal? Very much work--smart work.”

Bob Ernst, men’s varsity coach at the University of Washington and former coach of the national team, puts it succinctly: “You know as well as I do that this guy is going to be kicking ass because what’s keeping his job for him? Results! He’s gotta have some results.”

Grinko’s Occoquan is mutating rapidly. At first, when performing bench-row exercises--in which a rower lies face down on a bench and pulls a weight bar up to chest height--his rowers would, as instructed, drop the weights at the top end of the lift. This cracked the concrete floor, which annoyed the landlord, so 50-pound bags of sand were brought in to cushion the blows. The sand became crushed and filled the room with a choking dust. The freezing temperature outside precluded opening the doors. The solution? Turn up the music--Billy Idol, INXS, AC/ DC--take a deep, dusty breath, and suffer .

GRINKO HAS TAKEN A LIKING to many things American: his ’81 Mercury Cougar, inexpensive red wines and, most of all, the Sizzler restaurant. Dining with 45-year-old Grinko at Sizzler is like taking a small child to Disneyland. Waiting in line, he gazes unabashedly at the glorious tubs of that unlimited American food, especially the strawberries, pineapple, watermelon, oranges--”from Flor-ee-da.”

Grinko says he plans to return to the Soviet Union in about six years--if his contract is renewed for the ’96 Olympics. Until then, his wife and 16-year-old son wait patiently for his letters to drop through the mail slot of their three-room apartment.

After several pints of beer--he signals for more by holding up his empty glass and saying “Yes” to the waitress--and multiple helpings of every food item (like a true oarsman), Grinko begins to speak wistfully, not so much of his distant family but of the failures of his distant country. “In Soviet Union, only place a person can be the best is sport. Everything is bad.” He looks around. “Nothing like this,” he gestures, as if to indicate not just Sizzler but free enterprise and the American dream. “No one works so hard. Work hard--little money. No reason to wish. I leave Soviet Union because I cannot do more.”

But the Soviets did treat their athletes well, as did the East Germans, who wrote the book on Olympic rowing success. Grinko describes the legendary East German sports complex in Leipzig that includes rooms set up for high-altitude training. Then he laughs at the current situation. To cover the operating costs of the facility, athletes are charged the equivalent of $100 an hour. Even so, Grinko agrees that the unified German team will be the rowers to beat at the ’92 Olympics. The Soviets are contenders, but several other countries--Italy, Sweden, Canada--also have good crews.

Grinko’s English is far from fluent, but he’s learning. For three months, he excused himself every weekday morning and drove to Northern Virginia Community College, where he joined 26 fellow new arrivals from 24 countries in a common quest. He always took the seat next to a young woman whose father is the military attache of Ecuador and copied her homework.

Greg Walker, from Detroit, one of the best male scullers at Occoquan, was concerned about Grinko’s English. “We were confused the first few weeks,” Greg says. “We thought he wanted us to do the squats with 100 pounds. ‘No,’ he kept saying, ‘100 kilos (220 pounds).’ Am I not understanding him? I wondered. Or is he simply trying to kill me?”

But Walker is impressed with Grinko, especially with his “plan.” “He has this huge piece of paper with the whole year planned out. The guy knows what he’s doing.”

During the past nine years, Grinko’s Soviet sculling teams won 14 Olympic and world-championship medals. But he had a long time to achieve these results. One of Grinko’s scullers had been training with him for 14 years. To ask Grinko to duplicate those results in a matter of months might be asking a little too much, but at least his 15 American scullers are eager to try. And they like him. They have wanted an “Igor” for years.

“Igor. He’s attacking my technique right now,” Alison Townley says. “I’m a little frustrated. I’m not rowing the way he wants me to row yet. But he’s very patient. I do have faith in him. Once the technique gets developed, all the miles and physical stuff will pay off. I have to learn to trust him. I’m not sure I’m ready to relinquish everything to one person and trust that he’s going to make me into something.”

The Soviet scullers have faith in Grinko, too, so much so that some of them followed him to Virginia. His ’90 world-champion quad spent part of their bonus money, given to them by the Soviet sports federation, to train on Occoquan with Grinko for five weeks. The American scullers noticed what seemed to be a contradiction in the Soviet scullers. They had paid good money to seek Grinko’s help, but they seemed to have a complete lack of enthusiasm for the training. Rowing seemed to be a job for them, a way to escape a more difficult job in a factory or the army.

Whether coaching Soviets or Americans, Grinko adheres to a simple creed: Quantity is quality. Unlimited mileage, every day, twice a day, is Grinko’s secret. Until Grinko arrived, 60 miles a week was considered adequate for American rowers. Grinko demands a revolutionary 150 miles of rowing a week. More Grinko strategy: Rowing workouts are performed at a low stroke rate of 12 to 15 strokes a minute at about 150 pounds pressure. In contrast, the rate during a race is never less than 32 strokes a minute at about 90 pounds pressure.

In rowing, coaches watch from their launch or from the side of the racecourse. Grinko’s modus operandi is to park his launch in a tiny inlet and stay hidden while his scullers row past. “Igor has this thing where he likes to hide in the bushes and catch you rowing when you don’t know he’s watching,” Townley says. “He wants to see how you row when you’re not trying.”

A SHORTAGE OF EXPERIENCED scullers has been one of Grinko’s problems since setting up shop. At first, the best male and female scullers--Doug Burden, a champion sweep rower from Boston who has successfully converted to sculling, and Anne Marden, ’88 Olympic silver medalist in the single scull who now lives in London--decided they would rather not move. Burden changed his mind in May, joining his sculling partner, Greg Walker, at Occoquan.

Townley, half of a double scull (with Kris Karlson) that placed second at the ’90 Goodwill Games, is one of the brighter stars to come to Occoquan. In fact, she arrived before Grinko. “Right now, it’s lean,” she said. “But I just jumped. I said, ‘You’re hiring the best coach in the world? I’m there.’ What’s holding me back? I have two more years of rowing in me, and I want to win a medal at the Olympics. I’ll do anything. Moving to D.C.--that’s nothing.”

About 20 scullers arrived, stayed a few weeks, got a taste of Grinko’s discipline and then decided the regimen was not for them. Others, like Ingrid Klich, formerly of Whittier, have settled in for the duration. She’s a rare sculler--one who didn’t row in college. She began sculling when she was 29, an age when many athletes are starting to think about their retirement.

The blessing of rowing, sculling in particular, is that the serious practitioners usually peak relatively late in their athletic lives. None of those prepubescent swimming or gymnastic phenomena clutter the racecourse. Rowing strength matures in the late 20s or early 30s. Rowers succeed the old-fashioned way--they work a long, long time.

Klich possesses the three main ingredients for success: she’s tall (6-foot-2), she’s exceptionally persistent, and she has no qualms about sleeping in the back of her pickup in the boathouse parking lot if that’s what is necessary to further her ambition. Fortunately, Klich obtained housing by placing flyers in the mailboxes of nearby houses, and a few weeks later she found full-time work in her field of soil science. Klich’s goal of making the Olympic team completely defines her actions.

“Igor is the greatest,” Klich says. “He doesn’t know the difference between Whittier and Philadelphia, which means he doesn’t have any biases like most of the coaches I’ve met. And he likes big women.” Having a real coach with a concrete plan, Klich says, gives her “the feeling that the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train coming. Now, if only we could teach him not to lock his keys in his car. He’s done it twice this week, and it’s only Wednesday.”

The meager turnout at Occoquan is not surprising. Until now, Boston and Philadelphia have been the favored centers of American sculling. Despite this tradition, their respective rivers, the Charles and the Schuykill, are not hospitable places to perfect the art of sculling. Twisting, narrow rivers, crowded with college crews, do not allow a sculler to train with the intensity needed to reach top performance levels. And yet scullers from these cities have been reluctant to leave. “People are funny,” Townley says. “They say, ‘I have my job, my routine, and I don’t want to break it.’ OK--but what is their priority? I’m a little disappointed more people haven’t jumped on it.”

Susan Tietjen, who’s been rowing for 12 years and who placed fourth in the United States National Rowing Championships last year, admits that she was reluctant to move from Philadelphia. “I had everything--job, comfortable lifestyle. I was skeptical of Occoquan. I didn’t want to be a guinea pig at a brand-new training center. But I came out here, talked to the other athletes, and it was obvious that they were able to train at an elite level. I’m glad I came. They are hard workouts, but that’s what we need.” The few words she seeks from Grinko are a simple phrase: “Keep like this. Keep like this.” Soviet rowers, Grinko says, are provided with swimming pools, a masseuse, three doctors and big dinner halls. The athletes don’t have to work or worry about fuel or housing. “Only train,” he says. “Not possible to train here like in Soviet Union.”

In Occoquan, by contrast, inexpensive housing and decent jobs are scarce, and the athletes are provided with nothing more than Grinko’s rustic training equipment. This lack of assistance is nothing new for aspiring U.S. Olympians--it is simply the way of the world. A vow of poverty is essential. But Grinko’s scullers know their discomfort won’t last long. The World Rowing Championships will take place in Austria this August. A second national team will be chosen for the Pan American Games in Havana, also in August. If they make one of the teams, a place on the Barcelona Olympic squad is within reach.

Grinko, who says his priority is to “make a medal” in men’s and women’s quads, has been given real authority by the USRA. The quad he selects will automatically be the U.S. representative at the ’91 world championships and the ’92 Olympics. The double and single sculls will still be determined by trials in Princeton, N.J. In the past, with quads from around the country competing at the trials, there was no way to select the best rower from each to make a super quad. Now all potential quad scullers must report to Grinko--no alternative exists.

ROWING HAS REMAINED VIRTUally unchanged in the past 150 years. The boats, called shells, once were beautifully crafted from delicate spruce and cedar woods. Now the shells are made of Kevlar, fiberglass and carbon fiber; they’re lighter, stiffer, racier, but far less pleasing to the eye. Despite these refinements, the end result is the same: Blisters on hands. Sore legs. Long workouts. Close races. The rhythm of a powerful drive complemented by a smooth, patient recovery, touches some pleasure point deep in the soul.

Timeless Rowing Reward No. 2: One acquires a lifetime supply of humility.

Two distinct kinds of rowing--sweep and sculling--define the sport. In sweep rowing, each rower uses one oar, as in sweeping the floor with a broom. The glamour boat of sweep rowing, the eight-oared shell, seen most often on beer commercials, is the domain of college crews such as Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, University of Washington and UCLA. UC Irvine and UCLA recently cut the sport to club level, which means almost no funding; the athletes must finance the sport. (This has never been a problem at Harvard, where it is a club sport, but it might prove difficult at universities where rowing is not a 150-year-old activity.) With colleges acting as farm clubs, U.S. sweep rowers have generally done well at the Olympics and world championships.

Sculling is the other side of the sport. Scullers use two oars to propel their single, double or quadruple scull (four scullers) down the course. Sweep rowers almost always find their way into sculling after college. Scullers tend to be free spirits. The single scull, barely more than a foot wide and very unstable, has always been sculling’s wild card. Most single scullers are uncoachable, irascible, self-motivated and self-made. With or without Grinko, Olympic rowing will never grow to Gargantuan heights for several reasons: the equipment is expensive and fragile; the sport is hard; no money can be made from it.

On the positive side, rowing will never fade into oblivion because the equipment, although fragile and expensive, is beautiful, simple, exquisite; a small slice of humanity will always be attracted to difficult challenges; no money can be made from the sport.

Something ancient, primordial and irresistible draws athletes to the sport of rowing--a wildly satisfying sensation, a liberating energy expended over a smooth, seamless body of water. Hurts, too. When you row hard for a long time--five minutes--your lungs grow weary, your legs fill up with lactic acid and start to burn. An infinite effort for a fleeting, intangible, often unfulfilled goal--this is the essence of rowing.

For those cursed with Olympic aspirations, “real” life is put on hold--no career worthy of a business card, no BMW, no family except for other rowers--until they finally get what they came for, be it a powerful sense of self, a national title or the gold. Friends and family constantly remind them that they are wasting their lives. They reply that they’re chasing an elusive, shimmering demon-dream that can only be caught on the back channel of some forgotten lake.

LIFE FOR GRINKO IS AN endless game of charades--energetic gestures that don’t always transcend the language barrier--training routines and Pictionary. Yet he seems happy. If he’s homesick, he hides it well.

He enjoys pushing the scullers to frontiers of pain that they never could have imagined. They respect his efforts, his eye for technique, his desire to make them the best. The scullers see the time and effort that he’s put into the Occoquan center, and they try to match his devotion. His rowers have discovered two ways to upset Grinko--ask him if he was a member of the Communist Party or ask him how many rubles he lost in the Great Ruble Conversion in April. The answers, in reverse order, are “Many” and “No.”

Grinko orders one more pitcher of Coors and then draws out his wallet--not to pay for the beer but to show a special card he carries, his motivation on one tiny piece of paper. It’s a calendar card with the picture of Yuri Malishev, the 1972 Olympic single-scull champion. Grinko defeated Malishev when they were both in the junior (18 and under) rowing ranks. Malishev went on to become an Olympic single-scull champion and one of the legends of the sport.

Now Malishev is an important rowing coach in the Soviet Union. But despite being given the best of the Soviet athletes, Grinko says, Malishev cannot coax them to cross the finish line in first place. Grinko couldn’t beat Malishev on the rowing course, at least not after the junior leagues, but now he gets his revenge by being a superior coach. As the beer is delivered, Grinko’s face creases in a contented grin, a look that says, “Yuri Malishev is in Moscow. And I’m at Sizzler.”