Meet Olivia Coffey, A Private Equity Staffer Eyeing Gold At Olympics

Private equity staffers regularly frequent the basement gym at 510 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Among them: an athlete preparing to don the red, white and blue in her second Summer Olympics.

Meet Olivia Coffey, a senior associate at One Equity Partners, representing Team USA in the women's eight next week. Her personal best time on an ergometer, or indoor rowing machine, over 2 kilometres is 6 minutes and 36 seconds.

Speaking to Bloomberg News from Erba in Northern Italy, where US rowers trained before travelling to Paris earlier this month, 35-year-old Coffey explained how she forged a career in the alternative asset management industry while pursuing her dreams on the water.

After graduating from Harvard in 2011, Coffey was recruited by One Equity Partners in a back-office role. Her parents trained with the firm's founder Dick Cashin - he and her father Cal rowed for the US at the 1976 Montreal Olympics (the elder Coffey won silver in the pair's event.)

Early in her career, Coffey missed out on selection for the London 2012 Olympics and was a spare for the Rio 2016 Games. She worked on the firm's research and valuations team and rowed while obtaining her MBA from the University of Cambridge, graduating in 2018.

That year, after winning the world championships in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Coffey resumed work at One Equity Partners and targeted a place on the Olympic team - an effort that was rewarded with a berth in the women's eight, which placed fourth at the Covid-postponed Tokyo Olympics.

'Rowed to Paris'

"It was a really awful feeling to walk away without getting to my ultimate goal," she said. "I was ready to be done with rowing, but found my life wasn't balanced, it felt like something was missing," Coffey said.

She resumed workouts in the office basement gym, attended CrossFit classes and began training with a group who communicated on an appropriately-named WhatsApp chat: 'Rowed to Paris.'

Coffey, who lives between Princeton, New Jersey, Manhattan's Upper West Side and Watkins Glen in upstate New York, and spent the most recent winter in Sarasota, Florida, logs 14 to 15 exercise sessions per week.

Awake at 5:30 a.m. each morning, she spends about two hours on the water rowing 20 kilometres to 30 kilometres, and during afternoons, she spends about 90 minutes on another cardio or cross-training activity, be it running or cycling - sometimes in Central Park - or on the rowing machine or lifting weights.

"I usually hit 250 kilometres a week, or 40 kilometres to 50 kilometres a day," said Coffey, who rarely drinks alcohol when training. "I eat a ton of carbs - things like cookies and sweet drinks, which are not great for me long-term," she says.

"When I'm not training, I'm recovering or working," adds Coffey, who aims to be asleep by 10 p.m.

As part of her work at One Equity Partners, Coffey sits on the board of Dragonfly Financial Technologies, a digital banking platform, and is a board observer for Montgomery Transport, a flatbed trucking operator, as well as staffing firm Prime Time Healthcare.

One Equity Partners' flexibility enabled Coffey to schedule work around her training. "I'm thankful, the firm couldn't have been more supportive," she said. "I feel really fortunate to have understanding deal teams, and colleagues who can accommodate my schedule."

Due to her rowing commitments, Coffey isn't subject to what she describes as a classic 80-hour work week. "I work as much as I can within the confines of training," explains Coffey, who generally logs on by 9.30 a.m. or 10 a.m. each morning. Through the fall, when she was training intensely ahead of team trials in March, she notched an average work week of 40 hours. In the lead-up to Paris, that number has halved to about 20 hours, as she focuses on portfolio management and opts out of originating new business.

Olympians Everywhere

The US Olympic Committee gives rowers a stipend of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in addition to health insurance, which a lot of athletes supplement with full-time work, said Coffey, who on a regular day, can jump from working on a financial model in Microsoft Excel to a board presentation.

In her role, she deals with everything from origination to due diligence to hashing out terms of a credit agreement, and she especially enjoys meeting founders.

"I know what it feels like to be super passionate and the amount of sacrifice and perseverance it takes to put everything you have into something," Coffey said. "They love what they do."

She'll be supported in Paris by her family including husband Michael Blomquist, a managing director at renewable energy project finance brokerage Open Energy Group, who has made blue tops emblazoned with "Go Liv!" for her cheer squad. Blomquist understands Coffey's drive all too well - he quit Morgan Stanley to focus on qualifying for a spot on the London 2012 US Olympic team.

Also, there will be Jamie Koven, a partner at One Equity Partners, a co-chair of the National Rowing Foundation and former Olympic rower himself, having competed at the Olympics in 1996 and 2000 in Atlanta and Sydney, respectively.

Koven and Cashin are not the only co-workers to have competed at the Olympics. Senior adviser Fritz Hobbs, partners Charlie Cole, Matthew Hughes, Ante Kusurin, and associate Jack Lopas, all rowed at prior Summer Olympics, and principal Mario Ancic is a former professional tennis player who won a bronze medal at the Athens 2004 Games.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)