Needing to finish within 14 places of the Spaniard Rafael Trujillo to win gold in the Finn class, Ainslie teased his boat around the course in the lightest of winds on another sticky day on the Saronic Gulf. At the end he was 14th to the Spaniard’s 13th and the title that looked almost beyond him a week ago was safe.
When he got back ashore, the 26-year-old from Lymington was unceremoniously thrown into the water by the Polish Finn sailor Mateusz Kusnierewicz. Soon the British star was joined in the water at the Agios Kosmas Olympic sailing centre by fellow team members Nick Rogers and Joe Glanfield, who had just won a silver medal in the men’s 470 class. With Shirley Robertson, Sarah Ayton and Sarah Webb’s win in the Ynglings on Thursday, this completed a superb triple at the end of the first week of these Games for a team that still has medal hopes in four more classes.
“I’m elated. I can’t quite believe it after all the things that happened this week to come back and win gold,” said Ainslie. He agreed that this had been his greatest fightback after a disastrous first day, when he finished ninth in race one and was disqualified in race two. From there, however, Ainslie was in imperious form, compiling four wins in eight races, with nothing below a fourth.
“After the first day I was pretty devastated,” he said. “There were two ways I could go — I could either stay depressed and not recover or turn things around. So I’m really pleased with myself that I was able to dig deep and bring it back.” Did he regard this as a greater achievement than his win in Lasers in Sydney four years ago, which ended with a dramatic match race with the Brazilian Robert Scheidt? “It’s difficult, the battle with Robert was just incredible. They were very different circumstances and I don’t think you can compare the two. But a gold anywhere is just fantastic,” he said.
Taken with his silver in Lasers at Atlanta in 1996, Ainslie now matches Pattisson’s two golds and a silver in the Flying Dutchman class at successive Games after 1968. The purists, Pattisson among them, believe Ainslie’s to be the greater record for having been achieved in two classes. Ainslie himself is not quibbling about the details. “I’ve always had a huge amount of admiration for Rodney Pattisson, and I’m equal with him now,” he said. “I don ’t know about changing boats and all that kind of stuff, I’m just happy to have won the medals and with the way this regatta has gone.”
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The details of how sailors come by their gold medals in sailing are almost always quickly forgotten in a haze of starts, windward and leeward legs and statistics. It is one thing to win a gold after a good confidence-building start and to go on steadily from there; it is quite another to do it after beginning with a day that would throw even the most battle-hardened elite sportsmen, when Ainslie believes he was deliberately and wrongly targeted by the French sailor Guillaume Florent, who claimed Ainslie had fouled him and then had him thrown out of the second heat.
With people muttering in the baking heat of the sailing venue that Ainslie had blown it or that bronze or maybe silver was the best he could hope for, the man himself simply disappeared into his own world, cutting himself off from the media and even from some of the many “extras” in his own team who wanted to help. He knew he could afford no more errors and so he set about wrenching himself back into contention.
Ainslie went into the zone. He did not win every race, but he put together a series and that is what counts, combining consistently good starting with well-judged windward legs and then downwind speed, a function of superior athleticism and Michael Schumacher-like natural talent, which nobody else in the fleet could come close to. As he climbed to 11th place overall, then sixth, then second and then an improbable first place at the halfway stage, his main rivals were starting to crumble under pressure.
Iain Percy, the British Star class skipper who began his own quest for a second gold yesterday, was one of the few to get close to Ainslie during those days. “For me it was exactly what I’d have expected from him, nothing more and nothing less. It was fantastic — it was done under pressure, but we knew he could do that. He was incredibly focused about it, harnessed to the task,” said Percy.
Rogers and Glanfield came ashore disappointed after allowing the experienced American team of Paul Foerster and Kevin Burnham to sail them out of the final race in the 470s before the start gun had even fired, giving them no chance of converting their silver medal position into gold. “Nick and I have had a fantastic season this year,” said Glanfield. “We’ve won a medal now at every event and this is obviously by far the most important.” Rogers, the helmsman, described the silver as the culmination of seven years’ work. “We came away from Sydney without anything. We’ve got a silver, so we’re really pleased and we’re proud,” he said.