Gordon Maguire - speechless!

News Corps' Irish watch leader was in a state of shock when he spoke to James Boyd about the leg from La Rochelle

It was a somewhat shell-shocked and battered Gordon Maguire who was just seeing off the contents of his second beer when madfor sailing cornered him in Gothenburg at the conclusion of the Volvo Ocean Race's eighth leg. News Corp, on which the ocean racing veteran is a watch captain, had just finished a creditable third into the Swedish port.

The normally ebullient Irishman seemed to be stunned by what he had just experienced. "That would have to rank as the most amazing offshore race I have ever competed in...ever. It was truly amazing..." he said - the words coming slowly, welling up deep from within, before running dry. The great Gordon Maguire speechless? This must be serious.

Sending madfor sailing to the bar for fresh supplies seemed to revive him. "It was everything," he continued contemplatively, eyes starring into the distance. "40 knots, 4 knots, upwind, downwind, rain, sunshine. Breakfast in Norway, lunch in Denmark, dinner in Sweden. Seven minutes between first and fifth. And there were times out there when it was a lot closer. And that was a light air finish, when we all dribbled across the finish line.

"It was very obvious that the points have become very valuable. At the beginning of a regatta you get a fifth or a sixth and people go "oh well, it doesn't really matter, we've still got eight or nine more races to go." But when you get to the eighth leg of a nine race series then a fifth or a sixth just aren't good enough.

"The points are becoming very valuable, so people were pushing really hard. We were seeing people on the rail 36 hours out of here and they were still on the rail 36 hours later - out of watch, out of sync, forgetting to eat, just getting on with racing the boats". It was perhaps their management of this strategy, of conserving their energy by ensuring that their crew were well rested early in the leg, that gave leg winners Assa Abloy that little extra edge when they needed it to take first place at the finish.

"It was a truly amazing experience to race against some of the finest offshore sailors in the world in such close proximity," Maguire continued. "I was asked earlier - did I feel happy to finish third and to be honest I was chuffed to bits to be at that level of sailing and to be surrounded by so many people at the absolute top of their game. These boats are now fully optimised, fully tuned up, there's no more that's going to be done to them. And everyone here has had enough practise to get everything perfect or as perfect as you can. And it makes for the most incredible racing.

"You make a mistake and you end up fifth. And if you get it all just right you end up third and if you do it perfect you come first. Assa sailed it perfectly, they sailed a really sweet race". The top five boats all finishing with 6 minutes and 50 seconds of each other after 1,000 miles of racing, would bear out this theory.

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