Carpenter is in sixth Olympics as sailing coach

A curious Marie Carpenter loaded her three kids onto a sailboat she’d rented, handed the instructor $5 for a few quick pointers and set out on the lake in Texas where her family was spending the summer.

A few hours later, as she battled a stout wind, the kids informed her they were ready to head back.

“I would like to go back, too,” Marie Carpenter remembered saying.

The youngest of the Carpenter kids clung to his life jacket as Marie, who’d struggled to get the boat pointed in the right direction, finally made it ashore. Luther Carpenter was 3.

“He said he’d never get on a boat with me again,” Marie Carpenter said.

The experience may have jolted the boy, but young Luther would indeed get on a sailboat with Dewey and Marie Carpenter again. And again. And again.

A boy’s love for sailing would lead him to a full-time job coaching the country’s fastest sailors, a job he has held over 20 years.

As an Olympic coach for U.S. Sailing, Luther Carpenter begins his sixth straight Games when the Olympic Sailing Regatta gets under way Sunday in Weymouth and Portland, U.K., on the southern coast of England.

“I occasionally think about the traveling as a little overbearing, and part of me thinks it would be better to be home more,” Luther Carpenter said. “But then when I envision myself with a 9-to-5 job instead of being out in the water and wearing flip-flops and shorts, I think I’ve got it pretty good.”

Luther Carpenter, 50, hails not from a seaside town bouncing with aquatic activity. He grew up in Baton Rouge, about 2 miles from LSU’s south gates.

But he got his love of sailing honestly.

Dewey Carpenter, a retired LSU chemistry professor, and his wife purchased their first sailboat in 1967 while Luther’s father was on sabbatical leave in New Hampshire. They brought the boat back south.

To this day, Dewey and Marie remain avid sailors.

They have been members of Pelican Yacht Club in New Roads for 40 years and describe themselves as the club’s oldest members. A Flying Scot and a Sunfish can be found in the driveway of their Baton Rouge home.

Their son has taken their passion and run around the world with it. But it all began as a deckhand on his parents’ 12-foot Widgeon.

“He was the very small kid on the boat,” Dewey Carpenter said. “We’d say, ‘Luther do this, Luther do that.’ That’s common with sailing families. It took with him. He turned out to be very good at sailing.”

Luther Carpenter got his first taste of big-time sailboat racing in junior high, when a team of college-age sailors invited him to join their team and race with them on Florida’s Gulf Coast.

After graduating from Baton Rouge High, Carpenter enrolled at LSU, where he started a sailing club.

College never excited the professor’s kid. He dropped out after two years.

“I was much more excited about sailboat racing,” he said.

Carpenter then set his sights on racing in the Olympics. He and a sailor named Joe Bersch made it all the way to the trials in 1988 competing in the 470 class.

Although they came up short of a berth in the Seoul Games, they were invited to travel with Olympians John Shadden and Charlie McKee and help them train.

“(He and Bersch) turned into a team that was quite fast, but we weren’t really always pointed in the right direction,” Carpenter said. “And that combination made us good sparring partners for the real Olympians.”

During the Olympic training, Carpenter received the best coaching of his life.

He started to see the sport from a different perspective. He started to wonder if the place for him wasn’t inside the boat but outside of one.

“I didn’t think I really had it to ever be as good as the top people in the world in sailing,” he said. “But I did think that I was pretty talented with the kind of skills a coach would need to help people out.”

Sixteen athletes will represent the United States in 10 sailing events at the Olympics. The job of their coaches is to monitor the “shape” of their sail, recognize how their boats react to transitions in wind flow, and to recommend techniques that can help them sail faster.

In 2008, Carpenter celebrated with Anna Tunnicliffe, who raced to gold in the Women’s Laser Radial class.

He hopes to have a similar experience coaching Floridian Paige Railey, considered a strong medal contender in the Laser Radial this year.

“Coaching is great when you feel like you’re making a difference for them,” he said. “It’s definitely fun to see them succeed.”

The team reported to London for final preparations last week, returning to the same location where Carpenter said the coaches and sailors have spent four years training off and on.

That’s typical of a job that keeps him on the run — leaving little time to relax at his suburban Houston home. All the traveling is the one aspect of being an Olympic coach Carpenter said he regrets.

Of course, he’d never trade his shorts and flip-flops for a business suit.

“This is a case where a kid has grown up to be paid money to pursue his hobby,” Dewey Carpenter said.