It started with a favour for a friend. When Rob Waddell came looking for occasional support ahead of his 2008 Beijing Olympics campaign, Mike Rodger had been out of coaching for eight years. What followed was anything but casual.
"I came back on the basis of helping Rob Waddell out occasionally, which turned from a casual arrangement into a pretty serious return to coaching. To be fair, I really enjoyed it, so I blame him for getting me fully immersed in the sport again," Mike said.
The timing of that return matters. Mike had stepped away in 2000 to focus on family and a business, having already established himself as an elite athlete, winning silver in the lightweight men's double sculls at the 1994 World Rowing Championships and representing New Zealand at the Atlanta Olympics two years later. When he came back, it was initially through work with Rob and a Cambridge High School crew, before his appointment as a Regional Performance Coach and a move into the elite programme in 2010.
Sculling was a natural starting point. "I started coaching sculling because I was a sculler myself and had my greatest success in sculling as an athlete," he said, noting mixed results across singles, doubles and quads in the early years.
One of those scullers changed everything. Emma Twigg approached Mike in 2018 after returning from retirement, and the partnership they built delivered Olympic gold in Tokyo and silver in Paris. "In 2018 Emma asked me to coach her and from there it rolled on pretty successfully," he said.
Alongside Twigg's campaign, Mike was managing multiple boat classes at the same time, something he found energising rather than overwhelming. "The boats were all different speeds and required different approaches, which meant you couldn't become complacent. You had to keep thinking and adjusting." Across his coaching career, he has contributed to four Olympic medals, seven World Championship medals and more than 20 World Cup medals.
His most recent source of pride sits outside the Olympic programme. Ben Taylor and Oli Welch won the men's pair world title in Shanghai in 2025, then opened the 2026 season with gold at World Cup I in Seville, Spain. Mike had been involved in their development from the beginning. "When you get young athletes coming through and developing to where they are and then becoming world champions, that's probably what we all aspire to."
The philosophy underpinning all of it traces back to the coaches who shaped him, particularly Harry Mahon and Sam Le Compte. "Your basics of coaching come from the people who coached you," he said.
For Mike, medals are only part of the measure. "We all want to win medals, but at the end of the day it's also about helping people become the best athletes, rowers and human beings they can be." And when he reflects on what the job actually requires, he keeps returning to the same word. "To be fair, it just takes patience and time. We all start coaching thinking we can change the world, but actually it takes time to learn your trade."
