The four-time Olympic gold medalist was painfully off the pace before
Christmas but is now racing back into contention
He has done it before. At the 2012 Olympics Ben Ainslie, favourite for the gold medal in the single-handed Finn class, lost the first six races to a Danish sailor. Starting his fightback, he accused the Dane and a Dutch sailor of ganging up on him. “They’ve made a mistake because I’m angry,” he said. “And they didn’t want to do that.”
Mild-mannered – shy even – on land, Ainslie could become something of a monster in a boat. In a nail-biting final race Britain’s greatest sailor just clinched gold. It was his fourth, to add to the silver he won as a 19-year-old in Atlanta.