Olympics, Ho!

By Hillary Bhaskaran

Gary Bodie ’78 charted a novel course for himself when, after heading west to do undergraduate study at Caltech, he made a 180-degree turn and sailed into a career as a coach.

Today he is the head coach of the U.S. Olympic Sailing Team.

Appointed to the top post in September 1998, Bodie has been organizing training camps and trials, supervising coaches, and coaching sailors. He and his team will attend this year’s Olympic games in Sydney, Australia, from September 15 to October 1.

“It’s a movable feast,” said Bodie from his home in Hampton, Virginia. He was in between trips to San Francisco, where the last members of the 18-person team were being selected from a pool that originally numbered several hundred. Then, following international races in Europe and more training in the States, the sailors and coaches will fly to Australia two weeks before the games begin. In Sydney, Bodie will continue to oversee the U.S. team’s physical training and technical preparations. He will help team members analyze the wind and current and set up boats and sails for approximately two races each day. The U.S. team will sail one-, two-, and three-person boats to compete in all 11 events, including the single-handed Laser and triple-handed Soling classes that Bodie coaches. During the races, Bodie and his team of coaches will have to sit tight as communication with the boats is prohibited, but they will provide feedback after each race.

Nostalgic alums and sailing fans alike should not expect to see Bodie or the sailors on television. “Sailing is never on TV,” he says. “No one even knows it’s in the Olympics.” But in terms of medal acquisition for the States, “it’s one of the most prolific sports.”

Still, U.S. Olympic sailing has had its ups and downs since the team won gold and silver in seven out of seven events in Los Angeles in 1984. Four years ago the team garnered only two medals—both bronze—in Atlanta, Georgia.

Bodie remains realistically optimistic. “The days of any country getting all the medals are gone,” he says, citing an increase in the number of countries participating in the races, some of which concentrate all their resources on top sailors in a few of the races. But despite minimal funding, he adds, the United States competes in all 11 classes and gives the other nations a run for their money. He looks forward to some smooth sailing. “Then we come home with lots of medals and go to the White House to celebrate.”

CHANCE OF A LIFETIME

“I couldn’t pass it up,” Bodie says of the top coaching position. In order to come on board, he gave up what he calls another great job, at Hampton University, where he spent three years developing and heading up the first sailing program at a historically black college. For that job, he had settled down in his hometown of Hampton, where he still lives (between races) with his wife, Mary, and their daughters, Kelly, Katie, and Caroline, ages 11, 8, and 5.

Before that, Bodie held positions at Old Dominion University in Virginia and at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he coached top teams for seven and ten years, respectively. Meanwhile, he kept his feet wet as a racer until 1990, when he placed seventh in the world championship for the 505 class in a level just below that of the Olympics. And of course, he has a degree from Caltech, a school that actually had a sailing team of sorts at least once in its history.
When Bodie came to Caltech a fellow student, Paul Gazis ’76, had recently “resurrected a dormant club,” Bodie recalls. Gazis had scraped together enough funding to get a boat, which he called Kobold, “a Dungeons and Dragons name.” A bare-bones team of four to six Techers competed against varsity teams from Stanford, UC schools, and elsewhere, securing an eighth-place ranking among California schools in 1978. “We were okay,” says Bodie.

It seems that this was the heyday for Caltech sailing. Boating specs would soon change twice, and the Institute would tire of buying new boats in order to stay in the game. Kobold now sits in a shed outside Brown Gym.

In the world of sailing, Bodie is more likely to run into an MIT grad than a Caltech one. “Caltech has a natural disadvantage when it comes to sailing,” he says, “unless you rebuild Millikan Pond and enlarge it by a lot.” Being on the water is an advantage that that other institute of technology shares with all the schools where Bodie has coached. “MIT almost invented college sailing,” he says and, riding a wave of enthusiasm for the sport, blurts out, “maybe I should have gone there.” He quickly corrects himself. “I rub it in to all my friends that MIT is for people who get turned down from Caltech.” One of those friends, with a doctorate from MIT, is the chairman of the Olympic sailing committee, Robert Hobbs.

“There are a lot of engineers and scientists in sailing,” Bodie says. “The 505 is a technical class. You can get very involved in fluid dynamics and balancing the forces of lift in the water and the air, which propel the boat forward.”

People, including Bodie, can also get excited about design improvements that make boats go faster and win races. But when it comes to the science of redesign, he admits that the America’s Cup races steal the show. Compared to the “strictly controlled Olympic-class boats,” the America’s Cup boats are “more open to design innovations,” and they’re larger. Thus, “tank testing and computer modeling play a much more important role in that arena.” Bodie says that he and Hobbs discuss how scientific research could benefit Olympic sailing as well. But sailing in the smaller Olympic boats is “much more empirical,” he adds, and funding for research is hard to come by. Since “there’s no use doing bad science,” he and Hobbs keep their discussions purely hypothetical.

Bodie’s love of sailing goes beyond technical know-how. “What really attracts me—besides tuning to go as fast as possible and helmsmanship, or driving the boat better than anyone else—is the game element of decision-making in sailing.” Taking advantage of shifting wind conditions and water currents, “racing against the race course” and finding its shortcuts, maneuvering among the other boats while “all the time tuning and driving”—these are the challenges that have kept Bodie in the game.

“Now I ride around in a motor boat and watch other people race,” he says. “It’s like being a basketball coach. I don’t shoot the shots. I agonize over every one.”

WHY CALTECH?

When Bodie made the decision to apply to Caltech, he wasn’t considering a career in sailing. The sport had been his hobby while growing up in Virginia, providing the occasional summer job. Then Caltech sent him information because of his status as a National Merit Scholar. He landed a spot on the waiting list and was later admitted—a mistake, Bodie suggests. He explains that Caltech had canceled its interviews for applicants in the spring of 1974, presumably because of cost-cutting and environmental concerns related to the oil embargo. So neither the admissions committee nor Bodie realized that, although he was “good in math and science,” he “didn’t have a passion for it.”
That became clear to the undergraduate one summer. “I was a research assistant at JPL, working with a great bunch of people in the exact field that I had the most interest in (environmental engineering), and I realized it still didn’t grab me.” Sailing always had. That emotional connection was important to Bodie, a self-proclaimed product of the do-what-you-love mentality left over from the sixties.

Bodie even loved sailing at Caltech. While fellow students studied, he and a few other diehards would fight L.A. traffic in order to set sail from Long Beach, Marina Del Rey, and points nearby.
“I was a C student at Caltech,” says the Olympic coach. “If I hadn’t sailed there, clearly I would have had better grades. But if I hadn’t sailed at Caltech,” he adds, “I never would have graduated. Sailing was my outlet.”

Soon after this story was published, Bodie helped the U.S. Olympic Sailing Team garner one gold, two silver, and one bronze medal in the 2000 Olympics.