Friday, September 29, 2000
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STAR MEDAL DICTATED TO SAILING PARTNERS WHO LOST THEIR LIVES
BIG BEN STRIKES GOLD
BRITISH FLEET HOME ON TIDE OF MEDALS

Star medal dedicated to sailing partners who lost their lives

Ian Walker and Mark Covell in Stars and Iain Percy in the Finn class concluded their Olympic regattas today with Percy capturing the gold, Britain's ninth, and Walker and Covell taking silver.

For Walker and Covell to leave Sydney with a silver medal brings to an end a unique chapter in British sailing which had its genesis in twin tragedies but has now ended in Olympic glory. After winning a silver medal in Atlanta in 470s with John Merricks, Walker almost gave up sailing when Merricks was killed in a car crash 18 months later.

Covell suffered a similar loss when Glyn Charles, his skipper in the Star with whom he was planning to race at Sydney, was lost overboard in the Sydney to Hobart race almost two years ago. The deaths hit the small world of professional sailing in Britain hard and left two of its most talented constituents without their partners.

But in an inspirational move Walker and Covell came together in January last year and despite what they knew would be a very limited time in the Star together, they decided to go for a medal here. Over the last week that dream, which both of them have dedicated to the memory of their friends, has come true and they have dug deep to put together an impressive and confident series.

They have done it in an extremely high quality fleet replete with world champions and former Olympic medal-winners and in a boat notorious for not co-operating with anybody who has not spent at least ten years or more trying to master its strange hull design and huge rig which is highly sensitive to changes in trim.

Yet today Walker and Covell made certain of a medal when they added a second win to their score and seventh and ninth place finishes which left them in silver medal position with just the final race to come tomorrow.

Walker, one of Britain’s finest keelboat sailors with a razor-sharp mind, is an emotional man and the loss of Merricks still openly distresses him. It’s a subject he still finds hard to talk about. “It’s pretty hard not to be emotional,” he said in the boatyard after racing, “when you think of everything we’ve been through.” Covell went a bit further: “I’m very proud to have been part of Glyn’s campaign and then carried on and made it our campaign. I feel that without Glyn I wouldn’t know what I know about Star sailing and both Glyn and Johnny have taught us both a hell of a lot and I just feel that we’re part of them.”

Walker and Covell went into today's race tied on points with the class world champions Mark Reynolds and Magnus Liljedahl of America and just five points adrift of the defending Olympic champions, Torben Grael and Marcelo Ferreira, of Brazil. There was everything to play for and Walker in particular will have thrived on the pressure of the final heat. There is nothing he enjoys more than hitting on opponents he knows he needs to beat to get the medal he wants.

In Finns, Iain Percy almost wrapped up what has looked an inevitable gold from the start when leading today's third race - the tenth of the series - but a big windshift forced race officers to abandon it. With two races to sail tomorrow, Percy only needs a top five finish in either to make certain of a crushing victory.

“It was done and dusted. I was fourth and Fredy Loof [his nearest rival] was down the pan, but it was fair enough to abandon it because the wind had gone very random,” said the unflappable Percy. “I can take a number of tactics to win, depending on the conditions. It’s pretty doable but you never know - it’s still sailing and you’ve got to be prepared for every eventuality.”

Percy ranks up there with Ainslie and Walker among Britain’s finest young talents in sailing, a man who combines self-confidence and an astute tactical mind with a hard physical aggression which has destroyed his opposition.

Going into the Games his main rival for gold was thought to be the Polish defending Olympic champion Mateusz Kusnierewicz. The Pole has not been able to live with Percy’s pace and was clinging onto third place 27 points behind the Briton and powerless to stop him taking a gold or silver medal home to Winchester.

EDWARD GORMAN
The Times

Big Ben strikes gold

This was the moment Ben Ainslie had been training for and dreaming about for four long years: the moment he would get his chance to avenge his defeat by the great Robert Scheidt, of Brazil, on the last day of the Atlanta Games, and carve his own name among the greats of world sailing.

As the Laser class began its long series of 11 heats with 43 competitors from places as diverse as Peru and the Seychelles, we all knew it would probably come down to the last race, just as it did in Atlanta, and we knew which two sailors would be fighting it out at the death.

Ainslie, the shy 23-year-old from Lymington who has dared to steal Scheidt’s crown at the top of the world’s toughest racing fleet and Scheidt himself, a legend on his own boat at just 27, with four world championships in the class and a gold medal to Ainslie’s one world title and a silver medal.

In Savannah - the Atlanta sailing venue - Ainslie was struggling for experience and, when it came to the crunch at the start of the last race, Scheidt pushed him over the line early, forcing his disqualification from the race. It was over before it had begun; the gold was going to São Paulo, the silver to Lymington.

That defeat rankled with Ainslie then and it has ever since. After four years of dedication, training and starving himself of almost any other form of sailing except Lasers, he lined up against his nemesis again, and again it was the last race at the Games. But this time the Briton was ready and he came out fighting.

With ten of the 11 heats sailed, the mathematics required Ainslie to be ten places ahead of Scheidt to win the gold. There were two ways of doing this and neither would be easy. One was to try and win the race and hope that the Brazilian would get caught up in traffic and finish down in the pack. The other was to try to sail Scheidt out of the race, forcing him to count an earlier high score which until then he was discarding from his total.

With the wind shifting and varying in strength, Ainslie and his coach John Derbyshire decided on the latter course. What followed was an extraordinary match race between the two which Glenn Bourke, a three-time world champion in the class and the manager of the sailing venue at the Games, described as some of the finest sailing he had ever seen.

It started during two false starts for the whole fleet when Scheidt became thoroughly acquainted with Ainslie’s intentions. In the third start sequence, Ainslie made his first big play when he forced the Brazilian into fouling him. This required Scheidt to turn his boat in a full circle twice to exonerate himself.

Like a lion circling his prey, Ainslie positioned himself on the advantaged side of his opponent so that, as they started up the race course to windward, he would always be able to stay between Scheidt and the first mark of the course. In this way he could control the Brazilian. While the rest of the fleet disappeared into the distance, the two best sailors in it danced together a long way behind, their tiny boats seemingly attached by invisible lines. It was, in turns, graceful and brutal.

Altogether they tacked or changed direction through the wind perhaps 30 times as Scheidt tried to wriggle free. He tried dummy tacks and rapid sequences of changes in direction but Ainslie was watching and anticipated his every move, banging his boat through the wind with a fluency Scheidt could not better.

The crunch this time came at the first windward mark where the boats turn to run before the wind. If Ainslie’s plan was to work, he needed to hold the Brazilian up at this point to ensure the rest of fleet were far enough away to stop him catching up. For several minutes Ainslie held him off; Scheidt knew time was running out and eventually he went for the mark from a position where his rights to do so under the rules, were limited. But it was a gamble that did not pay off, and the Olympic champion fouled the Englishman as he went through.

In the end Scheidt finished 22nd out of 43, just one place lower than he needed; Ainslie had done just enough. However, at the finish both sailors knew the issue at the first mark would have to be sorted out before a jury in the protest room. It was the gold medal race and the incident was filmed from several angles for television.

Nevertheless, Ainslie had to fight his case like a lawyer while Derbyshire looked on - allowed only to be there but not to take part.

It was well into the Sydney night before Ainslie emerged, exhausted, elated and with the gold medal secured. His dreams had come true and, like others before him, he was finding it hard to stop wanting to win and accept that he had actually won. There was a belated medal-winners' press conference which Scheidt did not attend - a sure sign that defeat had hurt him badly.

Ainslie got through the questions and emerged into the darkened street outside only to find his life lit up by the bright lights of more television cameras. His father and mother, Roddy and Sue, who have followed him to the ends of the Earth, were there to hug him and spray him with champagne.

After it was all over, Ainslie sat down at the British team house to discuss his victory. He summed it all up in one sentence. "I would trade two silver medals for one gold every time."

EDWARD GORMAN
The Times

British fleet home on tide of medals

A north-westerly wind danced through Sydney Harbour today. It blew hot on the faces of the sailors as they tacked their way up towards the Opera House and then, when they turned, it sped them back towards Rushcutters Bay and the finish line, their sails flapping like white shirts on a clothes line. Some of the boatmen bobbing out on the swell, watching the race unfold, shook their heads and said it would turn the bush to tinder and set it ablaze.

If that wind made it appear as though Shirley Robertson and the rest of the women competing in the last race of the Europe class were crouching on burning decks, then it was only appropriate. By the time it dropped as dusk was falling and the lights of the Manly ferry pointed the way towards Circular Quay, it had carried Britain to their highest gold medal total in an Olympic Games since the athletes of 1924 rode their Chariots of Fire to glory.

If those Games in Paris were famous for the athletic achievements of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, these will go down as the Olympics when rowers and sailors converged on Australia to revive the notion that Britannia rules the waves.

The coxed eight did their bit on the flat calm of the regatta course at Penrith Lakes and, yesterday, Robertson and the courageous, tenacious Ben Ainslie earned a gold each in the harbour to take the British tally to eight. They were the first British sailing gold medals since 1988.

There is the promise of more, much more, to come in the shadow of the Opera House tomorrow. Iain Percy held a commanding lead going into the final races of the Finn class, and Ian Walker and Mark Covell, a duo who came together after their respective sailing partners were killed in tragic accidents, are the sentimental favourites to clinch a gold medal in the Open Star class. The sea will be carrying Britain home from these Games on a tide of gold, silver and bronze.

It was a magical day to be on the water today, a day that, however preposterously and tenuously, excited nostalgic thoughts of the country’s great seafaring past. Ainslie’s victory in the Laser class, won only after a bitter, protracted tactical battle with his great rival, Robert Scheidt, may not quite have amounted to Lord Palmerston’s adoption of gunboat diplomacy but with its ramming incidents and its furious protests, it came close.

Scheidt, the Brazilian who, at 27, is already considered a sailing great, deprived Ainslie of the gold medal in Atlanta four years ago when he forced him over the starting line too early before what was to have been the decisive last race and caused his disqualification. Ainslie got his own back yesterday, nipping in front of Scheidt at the start and slowing him down by blocking his access to the wind.

Denying a yachtsman wind is a bit like refusing a sunflower sun. It becalms him and takes away his power. Soon, as Ainslie, 23, shadowed Scheidt’s every move, both men were several minutes behind the rest of their rivals. By the time Scheidt forced his way past, colliding gunwhale to gunwhale with the Briton in the process, he was too far behind the remainder of the fleet to climb high enough in the overall standings to overtake Ainslie.

Scheidt lodged a desperate protest after the race to try to force Ainslie’s disqualification but after a tense two-hour wait, it was thrown out, the Brazilian being disqualified instead. Because of a complex scoring system where each competitor is allowed to discard his two worst results in the 11 races sailed, Scheidt finished just one point behind Ainslie and claimed the silver medal. He refused to attend the press conference afterwards but sent his congratulations.

”I guess it’s really a case of what goes around comes around,” Ainslie said. “It is a shame that it came down to doing it that way. I would much rather that I had won with a race to spare but sometimes you have to use the rules to beat someone, and there is no question of any unfairness here. That is sailing. At the moment, I’m just trying to recover from the race and the stress of the protest. It hasn’t really sunk in that I’m Olympic champion but of course I’m ecstatic.”

If victory against the odds for Ainslie, who has the same vulnerable, hunted look that often fell across the face of Damon Hill, has brought him out of the shadow of his rival at last, Robertson’s triumph was greeted with a mixture of relief and elation by observers who feared she might be about to indulge her familiar habit of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. She was devastated when she lost the bronze medal in Atlanta at the last gasp. Losing the gold yesterday would surely have destroyed her confidence irrevocably.

It nearly happened, too. She held what appeared to be an unassailable lead going into the last two races of her class but when her main rival, Margriet Matthysse, from the Netherlands, won the first of them and then caught a gust of wind that shot her into the lead in the second one, too, Robertson, 32, from Scotland, admitted she began to think she was about to fail again. She clung to fourth place in the second race - just enough to clinch the gold medal.

She crossed the finish line just as the Manly ferry was making its umpteenth crossing of the day, its passengers shouting and waving from the deck as it skirted round the fleet. Robertson held her arms out to her side, asking whether she had held on to her lead or not.

Ironically, it was her former partner, Peter Bentley, who told her the gold was hers. Many have traced Robertson’s success to their split, saying that his fanaticism about the sport had made her too obsessive about sailing.

”I never thought about giving it all up after Atlanta,” Robertson said, “but I did make up my mind I would do things differently. I stopped thinking about Europe sailing every day in my normal life. My approach became much more quality than quantity and I made myself enjoy my hobbies more and enjoy life a bit more. I didn’t want to get back on that roller coaster and put myself through another Atlanta.”

The rest of the Britain team shared that sentiment when they arrived in Australia. Nobody wanted another Atlanta, another morale-sapping disaster that brought home just one gold medal. Time and tide has taken them far beyond that.

OLIVER HOLT
The Times