Gary Bodie To Step Down as U.S. Sailing Team Head Coach


Stuart Streuli
Gary Bodie follows one of his charges during the 2008 Olympic Regatta in Qingdao, his last as the head coach of the U.S. Sailing Team.
After a decade at the helm of the U.S. Sailing Team—and 30 years as a sailing coach—Gary Bodie will be stepping down and moving away of professional coaching. The team has won eight Olympic medals during his tenure—three gold, four silver, and one bronze. The team has a replacement lined up and will be announcing that shortly. In the meantime we had asked Bodie a few questions.

When is this going to happen?
End of the year, although I'm going to change roles pretty quickly after the Games. I'm still going to stick around and help with Rolex Miami OCR and then go back to doing some volunteer stuff with US SAILING.

What will you do to occupy your time?
My wife started up a little business a few years ago and she's been running while I've been doing all this.

Can you tell us what it is?
It's real estate investment

That's a pretty drastic change. Will you miss the coaching?
I'm going to miss it the day after I quit. It's been 10 years with the team and 30 years coaching and I just felt like it was time for me to do something else.

Did knowing that this would be your last Games as the head coach make the experience any different, any more special?
I tell you Anna [Tunnicliff's gold in the Laser Radial] was pretty special for me. If feels to me like kind of full circle because 30 years ago I started at Old Dominion in 1978, my first coaching job. It was a club sport, unranked, no facilities, six penguins, wood penguins. So I feel really good. Debbie [Capozzi], Sally [Barkow], Anna, and Charlie Ogletree are all ODU graduates. For Anna to win the gold, it feels like full circle to me.

Will the duties of the head coach change at all in the immediate future?
They're going to reorganize the role a little bit, try to take out some of the administrative and logistical stuff, including ISAF and Miami OCR and shipping and yadda, yadda, yadda, which I end up spending over half my time on and put that back into the office so to speak. So this person would be able to focus more the head coach and high-performance role.

Will the person be more of a team manager, more big picture?
I've pretty much taken an active role coaching individual athletes during my 10 years. I've done it where I've been coaching my share of the load. But again that takes away from the big picture kind of stuff. So I think the new person will be able to focus more on being the head coach.
I think [high-performance director] is a pretty popular title in Olympic sports, not just ailing. I think my replacement will actually be more involved with the athletes, and still be doing some on-the-water coaching, moving from class to class, but less focused on one or two athletes and one or two classes and hopefully it'll be successful in taking some of the administrative and logistical stuff off the plate. The reason that Sparky [Team GBR Olympic Manager Stephen Park] is able to do what he's able to do is they have five people doing what I'm doing and five more doing what Katie Kelly does.
One of their athletes came up to Katie and commented, "I can't believe you and Gary do all these things."
He was more admiring it than being critical.

With this change the program at all, make it more like the Team GBR approach?
I think one of the big strengths of our program, and it predates me by 30 years, is the independence of our athletes and the decentralized structure of our programs and the entrepreneurial spirit of our athletes. Entrepreneurial as applied to athletics, not in the business sense. They running their own programs pretty much and I think that's a real strength of our program and it's very American

I think one of the big strengths of our program, and it predates me by 30 years, is the independence of our athletes and the decentralized structure of our programs and the entrepreneurial spirit of our athletes. Entrepreneurial as applied to athletics, not in the business sense. They running their own programs pretty much and I think that's a real strength of our program and it's very American