Tanner receives New Year’s CBE

GB Rowing’s Performance Director, David Tanner, has been made a CBE in the New Year’s Honours list, following a year in which Great Britain achieved the nation’s best Olympic medal results in rowing for 100 years topping rowing’s medal tables at both the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Beijing.

Tanner, who was also Rowing Team Leader in Beijing said: “This reflects the incredible team that we have working within GB Rowing as well as the achievements of our leading athletes. I am privileged to have been awarded this honour on behalf of my sport”.

The former school headmaster and rowing coach has been the ARA’s International Manager and Performance Director since 1996.

As such he has presided over the sport’s most successful period in history. He is relishing the challenge set by a home Games in 2012 when GB Rowing hopes to maintain its unbroken Olympic gold medal winning record since 1984.

Tanner, who has worked for many years in a successful management team with the ARA’s Chairman, Di Ellis CBE, began his coaching career in the 1970s and one of his early crews, dubbed the “Ealing Four”, went from novice level to take world junior silver in 1975 followed by a successful campaign as seniors culminating in an Olympic bronze medal in 1980.

In parallel with his coaching, Tanner became headmaster of a large community comprehensive school in West London. This role made it difficult for him to coach internationally and in 1991 he switched to becoming GB Rowing Senior Team Manager, a role he has fulfilled since then, including at the Olympic Games in Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996), Sydney (2000) and Athens (2004).

Tanner was appointed an OBE for services to rowing in the Queen’s Birthday honours in 2003 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.