Matt Smith hangs up his oar at World Rowing on 31 December. Chris Dodd traces the life and times of the executive director who has guided rowing for a quarter of a century

Words: Chris Dodd

Photography Benedict Tufnell

Matt Smith was enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles when he went to the Olympics in 1984 as assistant team manager for USRowing. A tall oarsman studying for an MBA, Smith harboured coaching ambitions, and he grasped the opportunity to rub shoulders with the greats at Lake Casitas, the rowing venue for Los Angeles.

Kris Korzeniowski, a Polish coach with the US team, told him to watch a Norwegian named Thor Nilsen. Nilsen was the technical director of Italian rowing and ran a continuous international programme alongside the Italian national squad at the latter’s training centre beside the lake in the tiny Umbrian village of Piediluco.

Smith saw Nilsen at a distance, but his first contact came when he happened upon Thor in a Montreal metro station during the lightweight rowing championships later that year. He introduced himself and inquired of opportunities in Italy.

‘I am proud that we have kept rowing a sport and not a business. Many measure success by their bank balance, but we measure success in sport terms.’

Ever practical, the Norwegian asked if he understood computers, and Smith replied ‘Yes’. Nilsen told him to complete his degree and get in touch a year later. So, in January 1986 Smith sold all his stuff and flew to Brussels on People’s Express to be met by Nilsen and his dog Glocky for a twoday drive to Piediluco in a truck towing the boat belonging to the Hansen brothers. He exchanged a life on the busiest intersection in the world for a remote hamlet of sixty inhabitants.

As Nilsen’s assistant, Smith’s first task was to speed-learn Italian, and he was soon involved in editing the draft of the international federation’s coaching manual (Be A Coach), material for which was assembled by twenty of the world’s top coaches whom the Norwegian had engaged for a weekend and confined to rooms at the West German rowing academy in Ratzeburg until they emerged with agreed formulas for their particular specialisms.

Matt Smith in Florida at the 2017 World Rowing Championships.

World Rowing (then called Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Aviron, FISA) was going through interesting times. Thomi Keller, the former oarsman whose chance to row for his country was ruined when Switzerland boycotted the 1956 Olympics because of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, was preparing to retire after holding the tiller since 1958. Early in his presidency, Keller created a powerful umpiring commission and a Code des Courses for racing procedure, and over thirty-odd years he steered FISA’s wily passage through the Cold War, Olympic boycotts and impecuniousness with diplomacy and aplomb.

Keller’s diplomatic instinct led to the appointment of three balanced but virtually power-less vice-presidents – one from West Germany, one from Monaco and one from the Soviet Union. English speakers and West Europeans safely outnumbered those from the wrong, eastern side of the Iron Curtain on FISA’s commissions, and only one commission enjoyed a chairman from East Germany, the ‘country’ at the top of the medal table. Keller avoided excommunicating the South African rowing federation during the years of apartheid boycott by laying down that SA entries for FISA regattas would be refused, while the federation itself, led by the chief executive of Porsch South Africa, got on with opposing ‘separate development’ and promoting rowing in African townships.