Third time proves the charm for Team USA’s Sarah Newberry Moore
Miami native Sarah Newberry Moore’s sailing accolades include five National Championships, two North American Championships, and an International Sailing Federation (ISAF) World Cup Miami victory.
This summer, the Coconut Grove sailing coach will add Olympian to her resume at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games when she and teammate David Liebenberg compete in mixed-gender multihull sailing aboard a Nacra 17 catamaran.
After eight years and two previous attempts, Newberry Moore has caught her dream. The woman who has coached the next generation of sailors at Coral Reef Yacht Club on and off since 2016 clinched her Olympic spot in early May.
“The dream would be that somebody looks at my story and they don’t say, ‘Oh man, it took her eight years to make the Olympics,’ they say, ‘Hey, that’s really f**king cool that she never gave up’.”
Newberry Moore, 36, first learned to sail at the Miami Yacht Club when she was 8 years old. She later perfected her talent at the U.S. Sailing Center and Coral Reef Yacht Club. As an adult, Newberry Moore would return to Coral Reef to coach the Optimist Red, White, and Blue Fleets right around the time she launched her first Olympic campaign.
“I was sort of telling the kids to put it all out there and, like, go for it, and I was having to do the same thing,” she recalled. “It made me a very, very sincere coach, which I think I’ve continued to be over the years because I’ve always paired coaching with my own pursuit of something.”
As a youth, Newberry Moore became a master of the sport, winning the U.S. Youth Multihull Championship in 2006 and becoming the country’s top-ranked female multihull skipper just a few years later. She continued to sail on Sarasota Bay as a student at New College of Florida before returning to Miami in 2010 and starting a career as a graphic designer.
“I was occasionally sailing [competitively] as a hobby,” said Newberry Moore of her first years after college.
It soon became clear it would be a tough hobby to keep up on a graphic designer’s salary. “I went to one national championship and had to pay for it myself. It was my first ‘adult’ championship, and it was like thousands of dollars.”
That got her thinking. “If I think I’m really good at this and I can be really good at it, I could just bet on myself and try to go more-or-less pro,” she recalled. “Just full time and try to see what happens if I train all the time.”
Her first shot at joining Team USA came with the 2016 Rio Games when mixed multihull sailing was added to the roster of events. Despite top finishes, Newberry Moore narrowly missed the cut for Brazil. She instead assisted Team USA as a training partner while setting her sights on the 2020 Tokyo Games.
The start of her Tokyo campaign was marked by two new partnerships — she gained a husband, Emmett Moore, and a new sailing teammate in Liebenberg. Though the pair finished as the top American Nacra 17 team in 2020, their point total across all qualifying events meant Newberry Moore would again fall short of her goal.
By the time the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games began in 2021, Newberry Moore would be watching from home with a two-month-old son, Iren, in her arms. The first-time mother had only just gotten back to training in the gym and wouldn’t return to the water until October.
When she did get back on the water, it was with a new perspective.
“In the first two attempts at the trials, things would go wrong during these events, and we would ultimately let it affect the outcome,” she recalled. “We would slowly underperform because we were so worried about losing.”
“I watched people who were not as good as me beat me at other trial events because I let it slip through my hands when I saw myself not achieving, not being where I thought I should be.”
Newberry Moore approached her third Olympic attempt with a new strategy. “Instead of wanting so badly to prove somehow that we are this top team in the world, we accepted that we just needed to get the trials won,” she explained, admitting it involved setting aside her ego.
It proved a winning strategy. Newberry Moore and Liebenberg qualified the U.S. as a Paris 2024 participant at last fall’s Pan American Games in Chile. Then, just last month, the duo secured their own spot in the Olympics at the Nacra 17 World Championship in La Grande-Motte, France, less than 100 miles from Marseille, where they’ll compete for a gold medal.
If her Tokyo campaign was marked by the first years of her marriage, her Paris campaign has been marked by the first years of motherhood. “He makes me want to be the best person that I can be,” she said of Iren, now three years old.
“The biggest difference,” she said of her third Olympic go-around, “was like, ‘the time I’m spending training is time that I’m not with my kid, so therefore that time has to be really well spent because he needs me’.”
Her training consists of roughly 200 days of sailing each year, plus set-up and breakdown days. (She and Liebenberg are their own boat mechanics.) Those days might include an hour of servicing the boat, which she calls one of the more complex to rig amongst the Olympic classes, plus an hour spent in the gym. Then there’s anywhere from two-and-a-half to five hours spent out on the water and more time logged reviewing video and pictures.
“I’ll get maybe like seven days off at a time after like six weeks on,” said Newberry Moore, who over the last year has competed in the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain in addition to spending time training at Team USA’s base in Marseille.
Liebenberg isn’t the only teammate joining her on trips abroad. With the support of relatives, au pairs, and nannies, Iren also tags along for a few weeks at a time. On her occasional off day, she’ll plan an outing for the two of them, like visiting the local zoo or going to a park. “Mommy-Iren days are very special,” Newberry Moore said.
“I’m looking forward to spending time with my family at the end of the Games,” she added. “We really did this all together… my husband’s been there the whole time, and my mom, and my kid, and my friends — it’s been a family project.”
Newberry Moore hopes she’s “inspiring and representing working mothers and women who are dreaming of balance between passion and life” with her participation in the Games. Mixed multihull races begin August 3 and conclude with the Mixed Multihull Medal Race on August 7.
In addition to representing the United States, “I feel like I represent Miami,” Newberry Moore said. “Miami is coming with me to the Games.”
Newberry Moore isn’t the only Paris Olympic sailor you might bump into on South Bayshore Drive. Coral Reef Yacht Club has also hosted her Olympic sailing teammates Lara Dallman-Weiss and Stephanie Roble, each one half of Team USA’s two-person dinghy and 49erFX skiff pairings, respectively. Newberry Moore calls them some of her best friends.
“I just have this amazing relationship with them where we regularly support each other, and inspire each other, and bring whatever experience and knowledge we have to each other,” she said. “We’re always there as this group, and now we can actually go to the Olympics together, which is really cool.”
