Jutta Lau changes to China

Germany’s most successful rowing coach Jutta Lau is to coach in China. The German Rowing Federation announced today that Lau will move at the end of January.

China has already stated their desire to do well in rowing at the 2012 London Olympic Games and Lau’s appointment will be geared towards these Games. Lau will begin coaching a provincial team as China will not go to the 2009 World Rowing Championships. Then in 2010 Lau will be in charge of the Chinese women’s sculling team.

Lau said in the German Rowing Federation press release, "I am glad to take on this new challenge, but this does not necessarily have to be definitive. Perhaps I'll come back [to Germany] in 2012, stronger and with more experience.”

Before becoming a coach, Lau, 53, won Olympic gold in the women’s coxed four at the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games. As head coach of the German women’s sculling programme, Lau has become the most successful sculling coach in the world with the number of medals her athletes have won at the Olympic Games and World Championships. Her long list of athletes include rowing’s most medalled female athlete Kathrin Boron and Olympic and World Champion, Katrin Rutschow-Stomporowski. In 2001 Lau became FISA Coach of the Year.

"We regret this step very much,” said Siegfried Kaidel, president of the German Rowing Federation. “Lau is by far our best coach. Since 1984 and up until Athens, she collected, as a coach, at least one gold medal at every Games and crowned her career in 2004 in Athens with two golds and two silvers. In Beijing she was only two-hundredths of a second away from gold. We will not be able to fill the gap, but we do wish Jutta all the best for her personal development.”

Lau began coaching in Germany in 1980 and has been the head of the German women’s sculling programme for 24 years. Up until now she has never coached in another country.

This change comes in the midst of a restructuring of Germany’s rowing administration after performing below expectation at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

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