Twice she crouched into the blocks at an Olympic Games for Australia, in the 100 meters hurdles at Munich in 1972 and, eight years later, wearing the team captain's armband in Moscow. Penny Gillies, the Sydney hurdler who spent the second half of her life turning that experience into three decades of national team coaching, died in Sydney on September 10, 2026, at the age of 75.

Born Penelope Elizabeth McCallum on July 20, 1951, she came up through the same Sydney athletics circles that produced Betty Cuthbert, and was for a time trained by Cuthbert's own coach, June Ferguson. Athletics Australia lists Gillies, alongside 1968 Olympic 80 meters hurdles champion Maureen Caird and sprinter Sandra Brown, among the athletes Ferguson shaped across four decades of coaching.

Gillies won selection to the 1969 Pacific Conference Games in Tokyo, taking silver in the 100 meters hurdles, and made her first Commonwealth Games team the following year in Edinburgh, finishing fourth in the hurdles final. She went on to win five Australian titles in the event and represented Oceania at three World Cups, in 1977, 1979 and 1981, either side of her two Olympic campaigns, according to Athletics Australia.

At the 1972 Munich Olympics she competed in the 100 meters hurdles and the 4x100 meters relay. She returned to the Games eight years later in Moscow as her team's captain, the same year she ran 13.10 seconds for the hurdles, a time her own club, UTS Northern Suburbs Athletic Club, says ranked among the fastest ever recorded by an Australian woman in the event and still sits inside the national all-time top ten. UTS Northern Suburbs Athletic Club also noted she taught for years at St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill, and Arden Anglican School while she raced.

She joined the UTS Norths coaching panel in the 1990s and became a fixture of the national team setup from 1996 onward, guiding sprinters, hurdlers and relay squads through age-group and senior internationals for close to three decades. Her appointments took her to the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002 and Melbourne in 2006, and in 2005 to the head coaching job for Australia's sprints and relays at the World Youth Championships in Marrakesh, Morocco, a post she called "the pinnacle of my coaching career. It's a very prestigious appointment."

Over those years at UTS Norths she coached five Australian open champions across the 100 meters hurdles and 400 meters, including Charlotte Yeates and James Gurr, and took athletes to the 2011 Commonwealth Youth Games, the 2014 Youth Olympic Games and the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021. At the 2019 World Championships in Doha she coached Steven Solomon in the 400 meters and Bella O'Grady in the 4x400 meters relay, according to selection records published by NSW Athletics. Athletics Australia named her its Junior Athlete Coach of the Year later that year.

In 2024, Gillies was made a Member of the Order of Australia in the King's Birthday Honours for service to athletics as a coach and competitor. Announcing that year's honourees, Athletics Australia president Jane Flemming said "each of these individuals has made a great impact on our sport." Gillies was also a life member of Athletics Australia, Athletics NSW and UTS Norths.

She was survived by her husband, Les, a longtime UTS Norths committeeman, and their son, Andrew.

The line of coaching that produced her ran back through June Ferguson to Betty Cuthbert's Olympic gold medals in the 1950s, and Gillies carried it forward for another generation, from the sprint relay squads she sent to Commonwealth Games and World Championships down to the juniors she still coached at UTS Norths. Her name stayed on Australian team sheets for more than two decades after her own last Olympic race, a second career in the sport that outlasted her first.