Waiting game

In Athens thedailysail's Olympic correspondent Andrew Preece sets the scene for the 2004 Olympiad

Two unmarked blimps lumber overhead day and night, it’s stealth-style security. It takes 20 minutes to get a car and four passengers into the venue through X-Ray machines and under-vehicle mirror searches. Gunboats patrol the perimeter of the racing area, the sailing venue is sealed ashore and afloat from the outside world. Welcome to the modern Olympics!

Everything is now ready. The gaggles of Tornados tuning together as they have been all year are beginning to disassemble into lonesome and more secretive solo fighting units and yesterday the fleets that begin racing tomorrow - the Finn, Yngling, 470 (together with the boards that start with the Laser and Europe on Sunday) - raced their practice races. It was encouraging for Britain but watching the patchy and unpredictable sea breeze streaking onto the land, this could be a regatta where almost anything could happen. This could be the high scoring regatta to end all high scoring regattas. "It’s not how good your good results are," says Ben Ainslie; "It’s how bad your bad results are and how you can recover."

They say that the cream rises to the top and certainly Ainslie proved that to be the case when he rounded the top mark in the teens on the Finn course, rallied through ninth to third four legs later and, as many of the key contenders pulled out and headed home to escape the dying breeze and the sapping heat, led the race before he too turned for home. The race committee waited at the final upwind buoy but they had no customers.

On the Yngling course things were far more earnest. The host broadcast television operation - that numbers nearly 100 people - was rehearsing live coverage with three choppers, three boats and on board cameras on four of the boats; the sailing coverage will be almost wall-to-wall live over the next couple of weeks on BBC Interactive (press the red button if you have one). Shirley Robertson, Sarah Webb and Sarah Ayton led for most of the way until they, like Ainslie, pulled out. "There’s no way that you get even close to winning the practice race. You have to pull out way before the end," joked Robertson later.

Robertson is a different and more relaxed person since her Gold Medal performance in Sydney and, as the oldest member of the British sailing team and a sailor about to experience her fourth ‘mind-blowing’ opening ceremony, appears on the face of it to be not just ready but in a comfortable mental place. "We’re the only team with a shiny mast," joked the sailor who has a ‘Legally Blond’ sticker on the back of her Volvo. "So we can do our faces before we come in from sailing." Beneath the humour is the leader of a young and hungry team that is determined rather than desperate to do well.

And if Nick Rogers and Jo Glanfield are desperate to right the wrongs of Sydney where they came so close to a medal but ended up fourth, it doesn’t show. The 470 sailors won the Princess Sofia Regatta and won the 470 European championship and are happy to be ranked among the favourites to win Gold. The pair fire each other up with ultra-competitive games of table tennis or Connect 4 before sailing, and then walk almost hand-in-hand to the vast sailing venue.

Elsewhere the expectation of performance is less onerously heavy. No pressure on the likes of Natasha Sturgess, Laura Baldwin or Christina Bassadone and Katherine Hopson who are here in Athens to learn and enjoy and hopefully become the standard bearers that Robertson, Ainslie and Percy have become despite the fact that the Ainslie and Percy are still in their 20s.

Percy and his crew Steve Mitchell have been plugging through Star measurement over the last few days and, apart from a small issue with some jib head reinforcement and some keel filing, are virtually cleared to race. But they will have to wait. The Star class, like the Tornado class, begins in a week’s time and while we will all know if Ben Ainslie has returned the performance Britain expects a week on Saturday as his 11 race series comes to an end, Percy and Mitchell and Leigh McMillan and Mark Bulkeley will be battling to banish first race nerves.

While nothing out here is for certain - except that Britain is the favourite nation, Britain is the best-prepared nation and that in arguably seven of the eleven disciplines Britain is in the ‘medal zone’ - the prospects on paper are good. "Everybody thinks they have the most difficult class," says Star and Finn coach David Howlett. "But I’m pretty certain that the Star class will be the toughest to win. You’ve got around 18 world champions in there, seven or eight Olympic medallists and the depth is immense."

And talking of immense, it’s a word that does not come close to doing justice to the Olympic Sailing Venue on the coast by the old airport in Glyfada. They reckon it is close to a mile from the harbour entrance on one side to the harbour entrance on the other. There are vast arid, empty plazas with golf buggies ferrying security, Athens Olympic Broadcast personnel and equipment around and an army of volunteers taking lunch breaks and security courses and other imponderable exercises. It’s a stunning facility but also one that totally lacks any atmosphere and any visible evidence of excitement and tension outside of the dinghy park that is sealed off from the outside world.

Tonight the Olympic flame will be lit and the cauldron at the summit of the sailing medal area will fire up in unison. It will be a seminal moment and one that will hopefully engender the feeling of a dawn of something special. Until that time everybody is waiting. Waiting to parade, waiting to set sail for the first time for real after so long and waiting to feel that special Olympic feeling.

The start of the Olympics is so big that no one is rushing towards it. There’s no final loading of stores or fitting of sails that you might find at the pre-start of a transatlantic or round the world race. Tomorrow has been in everyone’s sub-conscious for so long and the preparations - particularly in the British camp - have been so meticulous that today is a day off and tonight will be monumental. Athens, say the camera operators who have been in on the opening ceremony rehearsal, is preparing something particularly special.

"I’m not that busy right now," says Team Leader Stephen Park who has spent the last four years working to this point with the rental of an apartment block in close proximity to the venue, has assembled a team of 18 sailors, six coaches, cooks, doctors, physios, masseurs, boat builders and psychologists to ensure that all that can be done has been done to place the sailors into a position to deliver. After that it’s down to the sailors and, perhaps more importantly, down to the gods of the wind. The Fremantle Doctor or the South West Solent Sea Breeze are conditions of reliability that sailors here can hardly even remember. Britain has put its sailors in the zone. After that anything could happen.