WELSH rower and double Olympic champion coach Robin Williams has been awarded British Rowing’s top honour in its annual awards.
The Old Monmothian, who learnt to row at Monmouth School under late head coach John Hartland, has been presented with the BR Medal of Honour in tribute to a career that brought world medals as a rower and two Games golds coaching women’s pair Helen Glover and Heather Stanning to glory.
Made an MBE in 2013, he also won three Henley Royal Regatta medals himself and masterminded seven Boat Race wins for Cambridge, as well as guiding the men’s lightweight four to the 2007 world title.
Introduced in 1987, the Medal of Honour is British Rowing’s highest award and is made for ‘Outstanding Service to Rowing’.
Helen Glover, who is married to TV wildlife presenter Steve Backshall, announced her former coach as the winner during an online awards night last week.
The mum-of-three young children, who came back to finish fourth at last year’s Tokyo Games, said: “This medal’s going to someone with so much of a coaching pedigree, that it’s really easy to forget that he was an amazing athlete in his own right, winning world medals and Henley medals.
“He wasn’t just important to me and Heather winning gold in London and Rio, he was instrumental to it all.
“From personal experience, the thing that sets this person apart is that he cares not just about his athlete, his rower, his boat, his result – he cares about every single athlete and rower in the system.
“He cares about every coach and every member of support staff under that umbrella that we call British Rowing. His passion is just unparalleled.”
Robin, who grew up in Mounton near Chepstow, currently runs a successful coaching consultancy delivering courses and training nationally and further afield, which saw him working in Miami just last month.
After starting his rowing career at Monmouth School where he rowed for Wales and won British junior medals, he was part of the Monmouth RC four that landed the prestigious West of England Challenge Vase after leaving school before going on to win World U23 gold and Henley medals at the University of London.
He finished fourth in lightweight singles for Wales at the 1986 Commonwealth Games and won silver and bronze in the GB lightweight four at the 1988 and 1989 World Rowing Championships.
After coaching London RC, he then became Cambridge Blue Boat chief coach in 1994, achieving seven wins in 11 Boat Races, with one of the defeats the remarkable one-foot loss in 2003 that could have gone either way.
He also coached the GB lightweight four to 10th at the Atlanta Olympics, and later joined GB rowing in 2005, guiding the four to fifth in Beijing.
Having briefly stepped away in 2009, he answered an SoS in 2010 to help out with the women’s ’spare pair’ - Glover and Stanning - who were raw World Start graduates – and within six months had helped them to take silver at the worlds.
After another silver in 2011, they then went unbeaten for five years, taking Team GB’s first gold in any sport at London 2012 and defending the title in Rio four years later.
Remarkably, he came back from a major cancer scare that required surgery in 2014 and admitted after they won in Rio: “The pair were a big, big part of my fight back. I feel we have completely written the last chapter of the book with the best ending possible for all of us.”
An emotional Stanning said straight after defending the title: “Without Robin we would be nobody. Without Robin we wouldn’t be the team we are. He’s 100 per cent the third member in our boat. He’s the best coach in the world.”
Glover added: “Every stroke we took out there was down to him. He had a really bad illness during this Olympiad and you wouldn’t even know it. He was up coaching when he should have been in bed.
“His passion got us the gold in this event. Neither of us would doubt that for one second. It’s just all him, we couldn’t have done it without him. There’s three of us – but it’s him.”
Having stepped down from GB after Rio and launched his coaching consultancy, Robin returned to the Wye in 2019 to attend his old school boat club’s 150th anniversary celebrations and coach the Monmouth School 1st eight before Henley, where they rowed down US seeds Kent School in the first round.
But last year, he answered an SOS from the GB rowing team to climb back on board to coach the men’s four, six months out from the rearranged Tokyo Olympics.
He guided them to the European title and they looked nailed on for a medal in Japan until the last few strokes when a steering problem saw them squeezed into fourth.
