Klaus Riekemann - the secret Olympian

Riekemann’s time as an elite rower can be described quite simply as whirlwind. His first introduction to the sport began as many do. In 1957, at the age of 17 Riekemann and a friend went to their local rowing club in Marl, a town in central of Germany. “When we got there my friend realised rowing wasn’t for him but I thought ‘this is quite nice, you get to sit down and it’s not too stressful – this could be the right thing for me,’” he recalls.

Riekemann’s first boat was the coxed pair and after minimal coaching he found himself at the start line of a regatta. But the boat’s performance was far from a preview of what Riekemann would go on to achieve. “In rowing everything needs to be in harmony – but we were in counter-harmony!” Riekemann explains. “My partner came out of the water and I went in – it was absolutely horrible! Our club officials at the regatta were holding their hands over the crest on their blazers, wanting to disassociate themselves from us!”

However, the club president saw a spark of potential in this seemingly miss-matched duo. An experienced coach was brought to the club from West Berlin (at this time there were no travel restrictions between East and West) at the end of 1957, and in 1958 consistent training and coaching paid dividends. Reikemann’s boat was unbeaten in Germany that year and at the European Rowing Championships a gold medal result got people talking. “People started saying that there was no point in racing us as we would not be beaten,” he says.

1959 started in the same way with the coxed pair going unbeaten. They went on to win a second European Rowing Championship gold with ease over the rest of the field. After this win Reikemann’s boat was touted as a real gold medal hope for the 1960 Olympic Games. However, not long after the European victory things started to go askew.The boat’s coach decided to move to Hamburg and the crew fell apart.

This left Riekemann in search of another club and another crew which he found in Dusseldorf. The club there welcomed him in but he did not automatically get a seat in a boat. The club was home ofthe 1959 European Championships in the coxed four and so Riekemann would have to prove his worth if he was to make the crew. During the winter of 1960 Riekemann trained hard but alone until three more rowers joined him at the Dusseldorf club. They started rowing in a coxless four, training partners for the coxed equivalent. But success did not come so easily. “When the first regatta came around the coxed four lost every race and we had only marginal success,” Riekemann explains. “So, the coach came up with a glorious idea; ‘all of the heavy rowers will go in the coxed four and the lighter ones in the coxless’. We won every race after that.”

Riekemann’s one remaining obstacle before he could be sure of his ticket to the Games was proving his boat was the fastest in all of Germany. At the time, Germany competed as a unified nation in sport and so Riekemann’s crew had to prove that they were the fastest boat in the East and West of the country. They succeeded in this and their fate was sealed – they would become Olympians.

There were 36 entries in the coxed four at the 1960 Olympic rowing regatta and Riekemann’s German crew clocked the fastest times in every round, taking the most direct route possible to the final. Knowing their combination had great speed, there was still one unknown factor to the Germans;the speed of the Russian boat. “We thought that the final would be where they would show us what they could do and, sure enough after 250m  I looked around and thought “I can see four boats, we are the fifth – where the hell are the Russians?”

Just as Riekemann’s crew had feared, the Russians had blasted out of the blocks at such speed that they had left the remainder of the field in their wash. “We just stuck to our plan and said that if we are not leading by the 1,000m we have to do a burst of 10 or 20 strokes and see what happens. But by the 1,000m we had made it into the lead.” Riekemann and the Germans held their lead and crossed the line becoming Olympic Champions ahead of France in silver and Italy in bronze.

Riekemann decided to row for one more year in 1961. After winning a host of domestic and international regattas, Riekemann’s boat again had to prove it was the fastest in East and West Germany. “My team and I were in East Berlin on 13 August 1961 – the night the Berlin Wall was built! We had won our race again East Germany and on the Sunday morning an official came to us and told us to pack quickly and leave. So we got all of our stuff together, got on a bus and made it back to West Berlin,” Riekemann recalls.

The 1961 European Rowing Championships was to be Riekemann’s last. This year he raced the coxless four and for the majority of the race it looked as though it would be another victory for the Olympic Champion and his crew. However, just 200m from the line the stroke of the boat collapsed.  Many people had been hit with a vomiting bug at the Championships and it hit this rower at the worst possible time. The crew was fortunate though and managed to hold on to a medal position and take bronze.

“And that was it for my rowing career,” Riekemann concludes. “After four years of rowing I quit and went back to school. That was more important for me then. And from there on – blank. Nothing until 2011, other than a 50 year reunion in 2000 with my team mates from Rome, but that was just for the press,” he explains.

However, the rowing ‘bug’ lay dormant in Riekemann’s system, waiting to be unleashed again. “In 2011 we had some friends over for Sunday lunch. After dinner we decided to go for a drink in our local pub in Bath, ‘The Boat House’ but when we got there they were closed for renovations. We decided to go back but there was a property that we had to cross on the way, and that was Minerva Bath Rowing Club,” he begins to explain. “As we were walking through my friend spotted some oars and asked me to explain the difference between the longer and shorter oars and the different boats. As I was explaining a club member approached me and asked if I had an interest in rowing. “A little bit”, I responded. “Can you row?” he asked. “Yeah, I think so” I said with my friend commenting “that’s a bloody understatement!””

Not long after,  Riekemann joined forces with Arnold Cooke, a British Olympic rower who competed at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo and the pair took to the water at the World Rowing Masters Regatta in Poznan. As Riekemann looks back on the pair’s performance there, it is clear his competitive Olympic flame is still burning bright within him. “I can’t remember how many races we did but we didn’t win a single one! So we decided to have a ‘postmortem’ and analyse what went wrong, what went right for the 2012 Masters Regatta in Duisberg. With Duisberg so close to Dusseldorf, losing was not an option for me! We went there, raced four times and won all four races,” he says. At this year’s edition of the masters regatta in Varese, Italy, Riekemann raced in six races, winning three and finishing second in the others. “Next year it’s Australia!”

It is amazing to think that in the 50 years between 1961 and 2011, Klaus Riekemann was essentially a ‘secret Olympian’. “People are proud about what they have achieved, and I am proud of what I have achieved but I don’t show it off,” he explains. He may not have boasted about his achievements but it certainly cannot be said that he didn’t use them to inspire others.

His wife Jane explained that during Olympic years when they lived in the US and for London 2012, Klaus would visit schools and let children see his medal. “Hundreds of children have now seen the medal and the gold plating is starting to wear off in places,” she explains. “He likes to think that the gold that has come off has attached to every one of those children who touches it and it makes everybody just that bit greater. Rowing is not an exclusive sport, it’s an inclusive sport and everyone can be part of it.”

Klaus is now heavily involved in fundraising for the development of Minerva Bath Rowing Club and focused on training for the 2014 World Rowing Masters Regatta in Ballarat, Australia.