The first time I came in contact with rowing in Asia, was at the I-Lan Worldwide Invitational Collegiate Regatta in Taiwan. At that time I had experience in rowing  and coaching in several German Rowing Clubs and at the University of Hamburg for more than 20 Years.

The  local teams showed a horrible performance. They got slaughtered by the foreign teams from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Hamburg....

I was the only one of the present coaches, who was interested to look behind the scene and watch the following trial races for the selection of teams for the upcoming 7^thAsian Championships. I got the invitation to coach the team of Chinese Taipei to prepare for this competition, which was held at the same place.

The result was the best Chinese Taipei had so far and I got the offer to coach the national team again the following year.

In the same Invitational Regatta 1999 I managed to lead the LW 4x- from the National Taiwan Normal University to win the 2nd place behind my former team from Hamburg.

The typical problems occurred again and again. Local coaches, required as a coach and without any knowledge, pleading not to understand english, but knowing everything about rowing without listening or watching, insisted on the traditional way of tortures to “improve” their athletes hidden or on open scene.

Asked Why? everybody explained the lack of information, because none of them was able to speak or read a word English or German.

So I and my later colleague / partner and student Lin Yong-Long, now County-Coach in Taipei and Keelung, developed the idea to write scripts and collect information about sport-science and rowing and translate all these into  Chinese, to close this gap.

It took 3 years to get this version completed, but it only can give an overview of  the common requirements of knowledge a coach should be aware, while training  rowing-teams.

My special thanks must go Wu Pei-Ling, my translator in 1998 and still involved in the I-Lan Regatta as official interpreter, without whose help  and translating skills this book would remain uncompleted and a figment of our imagination.