Recorded in 2020, my guest is Robin Williams MBE, a coaching legend! He helped Helen Glover win an Olympic gold medal in London 2012, with her rowing crewmate Heather Stanning, after only two years in the sport. Also, Robin was steering the ship (no pun intended) when they repeated the feat four years later at the Rio Games. All this even though Heather famously had to stand on tiptoes to be accepted into the GB rowing’s performance programme. The pair, along with Polly Swann, won an unbroken sequence of twelve gold medal victories at world level and became world record holders under Robin’s tutelage. 

Robin had a 7 to 4 win/loss ratio in the Boat Race as Varsity Head coach at Cambridge University during the 1990s and early 2000s. 

Robin was appointed a Member of the Oder of the British Empire in 2013, for services to rowing.

We talk about how writing makes you a better coach, how to collaborate with your athletes, creating a framework for your sessions with a narrative, coping with a severe illness when coaching … and stick around to the end to discover how you should be communicating with your athletes.

Robin was the first person on my list of “dream guests” when starting the podcast, so I’m incredibly honoured to be speaking with him. He’s one of my heroes, so I’m playing the fan-boy in this episode. I also completely screw up a question I felt I needed to ask him, but found it very difficult to ask. How do you ask a hero of yours about his dealing with cancer? Anyway, I do get around to asking, but in a very roundabout way…