14 December 2023
By Hugh Matheson
Peter-Michael Kolbe died on 8 December in Lübeck, Germany, at the age of 70. He was one of the greatest single scullers in the history of our sport. Representing West Germany, Kolbe was World Champion five times and Olympic medallist three times and his duels with another great, Pertti Karppinen, have become legendary. Three-time Olympian and 1976 Montreal silver medalist, Hugh Matheson, remembers the times he crossed paths and blades with Kolbe.
In 1973 we were all in Moscow for the inaugural regatta at the purpose built Krylatskoye rowing canal. It was a good venue with a big grandstand and a first for most of us, a return lane adjacent to the main course, for crews and washy umpire’s launches to get down to the start.
Back then the lanes for A finals were allotted at random and as the day went on Lane 1 produced the winner again and again. The one which caused the most surprise was the, just 20-year-old, West German sculler who cruised to the podium in the single sculls. Peter-Michael Kolbe was in the building.
Most watchers, including the West German Federation, assumed his win was a fluke, enabled by the wind favouring Lane 1. Correctly thinking that the single is a lonely trade and that, if he really was capable of repeat wins, he should have at least one season for the Montreal Olympiad in a crew boat, he was transferred into the coxed four, for the following championships in Lucerne 1974.
There, he was sitting behind Hans-Johann Färber, three man and boat mover in the ‘Bulls of Konstanz’ four, which had won the host country’s only gold in the Munich Olympics. Färber is now, 50 years later, nurturing the careers of his grandson Ollie Zeidler, the reigning European and World Single Sculls Champion, and Ollie’s sister Marie-Sophie.
With Färber at stroke and Kolbe, safely away from the decision making at two, the Wessies finished 3rd, half a length behind the Ossies winning one their team’s many golds.
A year on and in the countdown to Montreal, Kolbe was back in the single and this time won in fair conditions at Nottingham. The medal ceremony was awkwardly placed on the balcony of the main building just behind the finish tower. The crowd, such as it was, gathered on the road thirty feet below. Kolbe received his medal and there was a polite cheer from the assembly. He looked down, his mouth smiling but his eyes not satisfied. Then in a gesture utterly strange to the forced solemnity of the Ossies, who had won most of the other golds, he spread his arms brought them together and raised his fists to call for more. Suddenly not a rower but a rock star. We, the apology for a stadium full of adoring fans, raised a cheer ten times the first.
It said lots. It was his right to win, it was his right and expectation to be cheered as a star and there would be days and days like this to come.
There were, but Nemesis is always lurking. You don’t know who, you don’t know when, but there is someone waiting the moment to come out and slap your backside.
Through the early season of ’76 nobody showed and in the lake on Isle St Helene in Montreal, in the Olympic final, Kolbe led the whole field by 4 seconds, that is over three lengths in a single, at 500m., he led by 6 seconds. At 1000m., it was still 5 seconds at 1500m., but there the boat in 5th place began to accelerate through the field. Pertti Karppinen of Finland was about to enter rowing history and folklore. He skinned the field, and its outstanding leader, moving 12 seconds faster than anyone and reached the finish 2 lengths ahead of Kolbe. Video of the race is on YouTube.
Now there were two people that everyone else had to beat in a rivalry that extended for twelve years, until the twilight of both careers.
Anybody who raced Kolbe in those days would look across ten strokes after the start and think ‘no worries, he’s there’ but look up on stroke 20 and he would have moved a length or more, thrust to the front with the elastic they use to launch jets from aircraft carriers.
There’s another point in a high end singles race when, after about 50 seconds, the scullers shift down from start speed to race pace. That’s when the scullers not quite in the class get dumped. Following on a bike you would watch him through the transition and wonder why you missed it, he just kept going.
His style was idiosyncratic – all scullers are – one reason he never did a double was that no one else on earth moved like him. The body remained close to upright from the hips and as he came to the catch his compression brought the backside up to his ankles and his shoulders stretched forward over a gently curved back and his long arms spread wide. From the beginning he was rigged with long sculls, on a wide span to accommodate his natural length. The relatively short inboard made the gearing stiff but allowed an efficient arc with no pinching at the entry and clean forward propulsion throughout.
The blades caught and the work was applied almost simultaneously. He was not a perfect boat mover. In fifty years of sculling, coaching and writing about rowers I have seen no more than five athletes for whom boat speed was on a continuum. Kolbe’s stern did stop between surges, but very little. His difference was in the way that as he drew the scull handles into the rib cage – his elbows splayed out higher than his wrists. This wingspan display reminiscent of an eagle in glide mode, was his trademark. It was partly the result of setting the work very high, which at speed in benign conditions made him look he was sculling above, rather than in, the water.
In any other athlete the style would have been awkward and almost clumsy but with him it was fluid and easy looking. You never really saw him working in the boat, even when he was losing an important race he just slowed down, like a battery not made by Duracell.
He and I met for the first time on the start of the semi-final of the Diamond Sculls in 1978. After the trauma of Montreal, he had taken a year off and Henley must have looked like an amusing little warm up for the real stuff coming later. It was also a two horse race and for a man who could cover the first thousand ten seconds faster than anyone alive, he must have thought he could scare his way to a Pineapple pot.
Henley is a very respectable place and much taken by its image as the top venue of a classy sport. There are no bookies yelling the odds at you as you queue for the Stewards Enclosure before a day full of racing, there is no Tote beside the silverware display. But, if you nod and wink and scratch your ear in the right way, there is a surprising number of people who will offer you odds for these one against one races.
Whatever his granny had told him not to do, the son of the house where I was lodging that Henley, put a fiver on me at 20:1. If there was no other motive, I was razor keen to avenge the snooty assumptions that a novice, that is to say someone who had only entered two serious sculling races in his life, was bound to lose.
My coach of the previous five years and the greatest influence on my life and behaviour then or forever, Bob Janousek, used to tell us whenever we thought we might go down in a race. “Just take them as far down the course as you can. Give it all.”
Kolbe was going to win whatever. The only race plan was to hang on to his stern post until the lactic had choked off the neuro-muscular junctions and night fell.
Hell! I was still in it – bow to his stern – when the Remenham crowd made a noise I’d never heard before. I looked round and saw a series of launch washes sweeping across the course. As, by then, Tideway wise and wearing a Tradesman shirt, you know to bang in the catch and harden on into the rough water. You can hope the change of pace comes when your opponent is in most bouncing discomfort. He was – and by the Mile I could see him and not just his stern.
Miraculously, the fatigue which was filling my psyche was expelled by a surge of triumphant energy. We sculled alongside – about level, for what seemed an age, before the crowd in the Stewards, informed by the fruity tones of Angus Robertson, that the sculler from Thames Tradesmen was leading the sculler from Hammerdeicher Ruder-Verein, West Germany, by a foot, went bonkers – even I am told, the bookies who were about to be robbed.
Whatever that noise did to me, it did the opposite to him and I was allowed to scull up the enclosures, a bit wibbly wobbly, but with an increasing lead and drowning in the waves of sound. You can win anything anywhere and you won’t get that noise. Unlike normal stadia the crowd is twenty feet away from your right ear, even on the Bucks station, and boy were they giving it wellie.
In the post-race collapse right under the press box, where there was some frantic rewriting of early copy going on. He stopped, brought his boat across with a touch on the right scull and congratulated me in English. Better mannered and more gracious in defeat than any crew I’d raced in or against.
The following afternoon in the final my old crewmate, Tim Crooks, took me to Sketchleys (a famous dry cleaning firm in the UK in the 70s). He had the advantage of knowing that there was only one fast 1000m in the box.
Thereafter, I followed the sculling circus for a couple of years and Peter-Michael never failed to look me in the eye and nod. We had almost no language in common and he was not one for small chat. Once at the mid-summer regatta in Copenhagen, I think, I had Karppinen in my semi and Kolbe was on the other side of the draw. Standing around the boat racks I shrugged and he said “You can beat….er…he can be beaten.” Indeed, but in those years they could only beat each other. First and second, second and first. The only men, other than Karppinen, to beat Kolbe in a championship final were the American Andy Sudduth in 1985 and the German Thomas Lange in 1987 and 1988.
It was a remarkable career, every other great sculler who has endured at the top for more than a decade has taken time out in doubles and other crews. After that Lucerne bronze he did it his way, on his own. He was a lonely and slightly forlorn figure in public. Later, in the years when he was President of the German Federation, he would be there, but only rarely in the conferences or chatting in the stands. You would meet him walking alone down the course and after the curt nod and word of greeting, he would walk on shyly.
Peter-Michael Kolbe, born 2 August 1953, died 8 December 2023.