Robin van Galen

About Robin van Galen

Robin van Galen participated as a coach in the 2008 Olympic Games. He led the Dutch women’s team to the Olympic title. After the Olympic Games, he received the award for Best Dutch Coach at the 2008 Olympic Games from Erica Terpstra. Robin van Galen has also been a coach for club teams HZC de Robben, GZC/Donk, and UZSC (with these 3 clubs, he won 10 national titles). He has been a coach for 29 years and has been the national coach for various representative teams multiple times. The gold medal from Beijing 2008 and the accompanying joyful leap into the water are still vividly etched in everyone’s memory. Robin has described his high peaks and deep valleys on the way to the greatest moment of glory in Beijing in his book My Olympic Mission (2009).

Robin van Galen takes you on a journey through beautiful images and personal photos to that fantastic Olympic Games in Beijing 2008. Short anecdotes, beautiful true stories, and a summary of everything they experienced there. Afterwards, Robin explains how he and his support team prepared the water polo women to perform optimally in China.

Authentically and entirely in his own style, he reveals the secret behind success and finally shows you how to coach each person more effectively on a personal level, thereby achieving greater returns from a team performance. Robin was the national coach of the men’s water polo team from 2013 to 2019 and then became the Commercial Director of the KNZB (Swimming Federation). At the end of 2019, his third and latest book was published: “Dilemmas of a Top Coach,” for which he interviewed 20 top coaches. His latest presentation is based on this book, which centers around the ideas of Louis van Gaal, Ronald Koeman, and many others. Robin is also available for webinars. Currently, Robin is also a lecturer in Finance and Marketing at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences.