Sailing: 'Our' true grit brit

By DAVID LEGGAT



The most talked about story of the Olympic sailing regatta should be music to Emirates Team New Zealand's ears.

Step forward Ben Ainslie, world sailing's hard man and a yachtsman who is set to be a key figure in New Zealand's challenge to regain the America's Cup in three years' time.

To gain an insight to the character of the gifted Englishman, backtrack several days to the first day of the Olympic Finn regatta.

In the second of the 11 regatta races, Ainslie had a mild on-water disagreement with volatile Frenchman Guillaume Florent over a port-starboard right of way.

In Ainslie's eyes nothing seemed amiss and the race continued, neither sailor hindered by the incident. The pair had clashed in the 1996 Games and Florent is known for his erratic behaviour, but to the Briton that was ancient history.

To his astonishment, much later back on shore, Florent protested the incident. It was a "he said-he said" dispute and the Frenchman's appeal was upheld. Ainslie was relegated to 19th and last in the race.

Under the scoring system of discarding your worst result, it meant Ainslie had no room for another slipup if he was to take a second consecutive gold medal.

He was livid. He kicked a fence, stamped on his sunglasses.

"He's got no morals whatsoever," he said of Florent, who has previous form for dodgy sailing ethics.

"This is by far the worst case of bad sportsmanship I've ever experienced in my sailing career."

The next day Ainslie sliced through the fleet from 16th to win.

Then he won the fourth race, then with a rage smouldering within, put together a sequence of 4th, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 2nd and 1st in the process of which he burnt off a fleet including some of the world's best sailors.

When it came to the last race Ainslie had 14 places up his sleeve on Spaniard Rafael Trujillo.

He finished a spot behind Trujillo and gold was his, to follow silver and gold in the Laser class at the last two Olympics.

Well before the regatta ended, people could be heard down around the dock pointing at Florent saying: "That's the one who wound up Ainslie."

"There were two ways I could go," Lymington-born Ainslie said of what he described as his greatest fightback.

"I could either stay depressed and not recover or turn things around."

Among those delighted at which course of action he chose will be his next employers, Emirates Team New Zealand.

The syndicate and its boss, Grant Dalton, can rest easy in the knowledge it has a gritty scrapper in its afterguard for 2007.

The Finn boats are widely accepted as the toughest singlehanded craft to master, needing strength, skill and sailing nous to get the best out of them.

Ainslie bulked up by 20kg and his sailing gifts took care of the rest.

Last February he won the world Finn title for the third successive year. Ainslie undoubtedly has all the hallmarks of a winner.

Now for Emirates Team New Zealand. He joins up with the syndicate next month at a training camp in Valencia. It might be a one-time engagement.

Ainslie, 27, and having been zipping about in boats since he can remember, has made no secret of his ambition to lead the first successful British challenge for the America's Cup.

But that is for the future. As he said, "it's just that everyone is sailing for everyone else these days".

Ainslie has his superstitions. He likes to clean his boat before competition and tries to eat a Chinese meal ahead of each race, which means he should be hard to beat if he sticks around for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

His hero? Russell Coutts. There are some similarities in their approach to competitive sailing. Coutts, too, was an Olympic Finn champion 20 years ago.

Among those left in Ainslie's ferocious wake in Athens was Team New Zealand skipper Dean Barker. He finished 13th overall and, with the bulk of the New Zealand Olympic sailing squad, was well off the pace.

So consider this: what happens if in the course of the next two years Ainslie carries the edge he had over Barker in Athens into Team New Zealand's environment?

Barker is skipper, Ainslie the hotshot. Over to you Mr Dalton.