Gary Anderson is performance director of British Bobsleigh. Gary has been instrumental in implementing a world class performance programme that is likely to be challenging for medals at the Olympic Winter Games in Sochi 2014.
In his first 18 months in the post, British Bobsleigh have achieved their first ever Europa Cup gold medal for the men’s squad and the women’s crew won the World Junior Championships. The squads now train as a full-time unit at the University of Bath.
Gary has worked in a number of sports at the highest-level, including six years in professional football, where he won the FIFA fair play award. He has held the position of World Class Coaching Consultant at UK Sport, (the government body for elite sport in the UK) on two separate occasions and was part of the original implementation team of the institute system within the UK.
He then headed up the development of the UK Sport mentoring programme for coaches with athletes on the world-class performance programme. His areas of expertise are in performance management. Gary has coached a number of international athletes from track and field and has advised international athletes from a range of sports.
Gary was appointed as performance manager for British Judo throughout the 2004 Olympic Cycle and as team coordinator for the 2004 Olympic Games. During this time he was also responsible for the centralised training programme and the National Judo Academy, a combined programme of academic study and high performance training, which produced a record number of European, Commonwealth and World medallists.
He was appointed as performance advisor to Team GB for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Torino. He then has taken on a similar role for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics where he has been appointed as one of the team managers for Team GB working with British Curling. Gary also works for the British Olympic Association on their Generation 2014 programme and has also held the post of assistant director at many of the BOA’s training camps in Europe.
Gary has presented at worldwide conferences on the subject of coaching and performance management, including keynote presentation to the Royal Society of Medicine in 2004. He is due to present at the UKSEM Conference in 2011. Gary was consultant and co-author of the book “Training to Succeed” published by Franklin Watts in 2008.
He has appeared on many television programmes as a coach and mentor, most recently on ITV’s “Beat the Star” where he coached celebrity athletes. Gary has also appeared in educational DVDs and television programmes.
