The return of Brilliant Ben

We speak to Ben Ainslie about his seven bullets in eight races in Qingdao, despite not having sailed his Finn since last year

Will Ben Ainslie go down in the history books as the greatest ever Olympic sailor? If not we would like put his name forward right now. Yes, he is a couple of medals short of Torben Grael's five, but with three he is well on his way...

To summarise the facts as they have panned out at this week's Olympic test event in Qingdao - Ainslie, now 29, has not sailed a Finn in anger since the World Championship (the Finn Gold Cup) last year in Moscow, having taken up a rather important day job as the man responsible for kicking Dean Barker's derriere around the track during Emirates Team New Zealand's in house training. So Ainslie has come to Qingdao, jumped back into his Finn had four days training in very un-Qingdao 10-15 knot sea breeze conditions with team mate Ed Wright and with eight races sailed has won SEVEN of them and in the only race he didn't win, he finished second, which he can of course discard.

Most who have watched hiim out on the race course this week acknowledge that Ainslie has been in a class all of his own. making it look at though this Olympic class is child's play.

Yes, possibly the Finn is an easier class to win in than the Laser Ainslie sailed for so long and there are only 18 boats racing, but at the test event he has been up against old hands such as Greece's Emilios Papathanasiou, who was second behind Ainslie at the Gold Cup last year and this year won Holland Regatta and is a past European champion, or Spain's Raphael Trujillo winner of the Rolex Miami OCR this year or Jonas Hoegh-Christensen winner of this year's Gold Cup and the Princess Sofia Trophy.

Of the present 10 top ISAF ranked Finn sailors (Ainslie is not in this due to his absence from the circuit) only 5th place Swede Daniel Birgmark, 6th placed Canadian Chris Cook and ninth placed Croat Ivan Kljakovic Gaspic are absent.

Other theories doing the rounds include Ainslie's weight - having spent so much time behind the wheel of Cup boats over the last months he is not longer the 'Beefy Ben' he has been when fully in Olympic Finn sailing trim and instead has reverted to his normal weight that is a fraction lighter. This may have suited the light conditions - but then it has hardly been a big secret that Qingdao would be a light airs regatta and everyone else had the opportunity to diet.



Anyway ultimately this is tosh. As RYA Olympic Manager Stephen Park confirms: "He is sailing remarkably well. I was chatting with two of the international jury in the athlete’s lounge and they were saying they were watching him racing and their words it was "absolutely incredible - a joy to watch". It is pretty impressive to get seven firsts and discarding a second." To put it mildly.

There is also the theory that time away from the boat can leave seasoned old Olympic hands revitalised when they make their return. Park agrees with this: "We often find that some of the sailors do quite well when they’ve had a bit of a break and a rest. The experienced sailors find that often a rest can help them re-focus and not necessarily expecting to come back and win everything straight away there is a little less expectation on them initially."

Ainslie agrees too: "You come in fresh and you have a different perspective. Quite often I’ve found when I have taken a long term break from Lasers or Finns you come back to it with a more open mind and sometimes pick up on new things which perhaps you wouldn’t have done it you are in a set way of sailing which often happens if you are training hard for long periods."

The only issue Ainslie admits he may have found troublesome taking into account his very recent return to Olympic sailing is his fitness and the particular muscle set necessary for racing a Finn hard that wanes on a diet of Cup boat helming and paella Valenciano. Thankfully this is another benefit of conditions having been light. "It has been okay for me here because we haven’t been tested physically," says Ainslie of his fitness. "It has been more of a mental game but that is an issue with spending a long time away from the boat is that the sailing fitness is hard to get back and the endurance."

Apart from one day the Finns have always been out on D course, 5 miles offshore. Here Ainslie says they have always had around 4-8 knots with small shifts, a light but regular wind with none of the massive holes or permanent shifts normally associated with winds of this strength. A bigger issue has been the combiination of light wind and the relatively strong tide that has been running. "The current has been strong but manageable," continues Ainslie. "Today we raced on course C and it was a pretty tough race because the breeze was down about 3-4 knots and we had about a knot and a half of tide and there was one point on the second run that we weren’t actually making any headway over the ground for about 10 minutes! That was kind of a tricky race. It is just one of those things - we all knew it was difficult before we came, so you’ve just got to get on with it."

Ainslie says the compettion has been good despite the fact that in several races he has done a horizon job on the rest of the fleet. "In some of the races there’s been a big gap between the fleet because the tide. You have a sort of tidal gate - you either stretch away upwind or downwind or somewhere you end up getting away from the fleet. The spread is quite big but that tends to be the same in all the classes."

For Ainslie this is his first time at the 2008 Olympic venue and he says he is impressed. "Everything shoreside is great. The marina is big and everything works. The nice thing is that the locals seem really happy to have us here. Even if you go into the town they know about having Olympic sailing in their town and they are excited. It is nice to be wanted."

Ainslie has turned into something of a media sensation in China, where they are giving the test event big coverage, including live television and a full page daily in the China Daily. "Coming in off the water the number of press is big for an event like this," says Ainslie. "And they know who all the sailors are and who all the personalities are and they are really into it which is nice." For some reason Ainslie has found particular favour with the young female members of the local press corps who titter shyly in the background whenever he comes ashore.

On 7 points to second placed Emilios Papathanasiou's 21, there is still the Grand Finale or Medal Race still to come and barring a complete disaster the Gold is Ainslie's for the taking.

A small short term conflict with Ainslie's Olympic campaign for 2008 could be his America's Cup sailing. For example ISAF's multi-class World Championship starting on 28 June next year in Cascais could conflict with the America's Cup which starts on 23 June. "It depends upon how well we do! If we go all the way to the Cup then it would be a real issue, but even so it is going to be tough to get any training time in beforehand so I’ll have to play it by ear a bit and see what happens," says Ainslie.

Cascais will be the qualifying event for the pre-Olympic regatta in Qingdao next year where there is likely to only be one spot per nation. "I might not be able to come here next year so it is good to come now and have a look," acknowledges Ainslie.

On to his Cup sailling and since the Acts came to their conclusion with Emirates Team New Zealand coming out on top, so Ainslie has been back deeply involved with the team helping with speed testing and acting as Dean Barker's sparring partner. In addition to helming the 'B' boat Ainslie has also had a fair amount of time behind the wheel of their first Version 5 boat, NZL92 while Barker and Terry Hutchinson, together with much of the afterguard, have been taking time out to go racing on the TP52 circuit. "We’ve done quite a few race series against other teams while they’ve been away and that has been a really good experience for myself and some of the other guys who didn’t get to race much in the Acts. We’ve been getting some good results."

Rumours have been going around about how Ainslie has been beating Barker a fair amount in training, but Ainslie wisely doesn't rise to this when we put it to him. "We have some good in house racing and we’ll be doing a bit more in Auckland and my job is just to keep pushing them hard and hope we can do a good job at that."

Had Emirates Team New Zealand not come out top of the pile this season one wonders if Grant Dalton might have made a few changes - however now this is just conjecture. "I think everyone is really happy with the way we ended in the last Act," continues Ainslie. "It was a fantastic result for the whole team to win the last match racing Act before the Cup and that gave everyone a lot of confidence in the team that we have and that is probably how we will go forwards."

From Qingdao Ainslie is back in Europe for the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup in Sardinia, racing on Neville Crichton's Alfa Romeo maxi, but is otherwise down in Auckland training on the former ullbruck boat and NZL 81 until 92 arrives. However the real action will start when Emirates Team New Zealand's second new version 5 boat is launched in October/November.

Ainslie says he has learned a huge amount with the Kiwi Cup campaign and it would be nice to think there is a British Cup campaign waiting in the wings which the likes of he, Iain Percy and Ian Walker could leap on board for the next Cup cycle - for this particular leviathan should be awakening now if it is going to happen. While Sir Keith Mills, the likely catalyst for this, was in Valencia earlier this year along with Sebastian Coe, it all seems very quiet at present.