Those months preparing for the America’s Cup were psychologically demanding. The tensions initially, and then watching as the team came so close to victory, brought a welter of conflicting emotions.
As I sat around watching the America’s Cup in progress, knowing by now that, in reality, my work with the team was done, I knew there were guys training for, and competing in, the 2007 world championships in the Finn, including Brits.
I must confess there were times during those America’s Cup exploits when I questioned whether I would be sufficiently prepared for Beijing. There was also a part of me that did wonder at one stage whether I wanted to make the transition back.
Yet, if there was one instant that persuaded me I wanted to continue as an Olympian, it was that special moment for all of us with British sport at heart, on 6 July 2005, that did it.
I’d been involved in the launch for the 2012 bid as an ambassador, and was at Trafalgar Square for the announcement by IOC president Jacques Rogge, in Singapore, that ‘The Games of the XXXth Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the city of . . . London.’ It still sends tingles down my spine. The atmosphere was electric. It was a real motivator for me; a real inspiration.
I remember thinking at that instant: ‘I’ve really got to be part of this. It’s going to be amazing to have the Olympics here.’ That was really the spark to become more heavily involved with Beijing and get my Olympic career back on track.
Although I’d been away, I kept my hand in. I’d won the worlds and European championships in 2005. The following year, I went down to Qingdao, venue for the sailing at the Beijing Games, to see what it was all about.
Qingdao is a coastal city that lies on the southern tip of China’s Shandong Peninsula, and is located on Jiaozhou Bay, facing the Yellow Sea. It is a well-known holiday resort in China. But I knew the next few months would be no vacation for me.
As I’ve mentioned, I did the Olympic test regatta that year, and won. I hadn’t sailed the Finn for a year, but enjoyed the challenging conditions: light winds and strong currents. It was a difficult venue. At one time I was quoted as saying that it was ‘a sailor’s nightmare’.
What I actually said, in an interview in the Daily Telegraph, was this: ‘The evidence points to predominantly light winds with maybe one day of very strong winds. There are also interesting tides and conditions will be testing – some would say nightmarish. We need to stay patient. Get becalmed at the wrong time and you will drop ten places at the flick of a finger. All of us run the chance of having a very bad day, but Athens has taught me that you can recover.’
Strange though it may sound, such conditions were actually a boost for me. It would reward the more experienced sailors, such as myself. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I came back in August, 2007, and won the pre-Olympic test regatta that year too.
Following that latter event I returned to full-time training in the Finn again. I went down to Australia in November to train there in earnest.
Despite those victories in the pre-Olympic test regattas, I didn’t really expect to just walk back into the GB team as the Finn representative. While, for me, the Olympics had been in the background, one of my British rivals had only selection for the Games on his mind. Ed Wright, then ranked number five in the world, was concentrating on the event, and doing well. He won the European championships in 2006. It ensured it would be a difficult time for the selectors.
The main trial event had been the 2007 world championships at Cascais in Portugal, where Ed Wright had finished sixth. I was absent as it had clashed with the America’s Cup. Though that had obviously been my own choice, I had won those two test events at Qingdao.
The RYA’s Olympic Selection Committee named most of the sailors they wanted to represent Great Britain in October 2007. But the Finn class was one of the few where the nominations were postponed to allow for further trials. I was surprised by some of the attitudes towards me and the question of Olympic qualification, which was played out to a strange background.
Yes, I’d been away from single-handed sailing for some time to concentrate on the America’s Cup. But I’d won the Finn world championships in 2005. And despite the fact that I’d basically sailed for only two weeks in the Finn before racing in the test regatta at Qingdao in 2006, I won by a long way. I’d repeated the feat in 2007, again quite comfortably, and without any practice. In neither case had I gone back to full-time training for it.
I guess that certain people just didn’t like the idea of me ‘swanning back’, as they saw it, as GB’s Finn representative, particularly as another Olympic gold medallist, Shirley Robertson, who was desperate to make Olympic history by becoming the first British woman to win three gold medals, had failed to make the GB team for Beijing.
The RYA had selected two of her Athens crew-mates, Sarah Ayton and Sarah Webb, together with Pippa Wilson, to contest the Yngling class after they took the world title in Cascais and won the final Olympic test event in China.
Shirley, who had taken time off and given birth to twins, had asked the RYA for an extension of the trials, but it was not forthcoming. Though I had dropped to 104th in the world rankings – for obvious reasons – I was more fortunate.
Admittedly, it was always going to be a difficult time for the selectors. I had been away concentrating on the America’s Cup, although I’d kept my hand in. Ed Wright was focussing purely on the Finn, and doing quite well. Ultimately, the RYA attempted to be as fair as possible, which I think they were.
They decided that the Sydney International Regatta in December would be the main event of the selection trials which would lead to qualification for the Olympics. If it was still not possible after that for the selectors to make a decision, there were always the world championships at the end of January in Melbourne. I was philosophical about it. If I had to go out and prove myself, so be it.
So, it was back to the scene of my first Olympic triumph seven years before in Sydney Harbour to ensure I made it to the start line, knowing that if I could could win decisively, the one available Olympic spot in the Finn would be mine.
It hadn’t been the first time Ed or I had been involved in winner-takes-all qualification events. Four years previously, Ed, against whom I’d raced regularly since we had been teenagers in the youth squad, narrowly missed out on the Athens Olympics in the Laser class after losing out to Paul Goodison. Conversely, it will be recalled, I qualified for those Games by winning the world championships the year before, at the expense of my good friend ‘Bart’ Simpson, who finished third. It’s exceptionally tough for those guys who don’t qualify because of all the huge amount of time and effort they’ve put in. That’s it; there’s no consolation prize.
I thought back to when I was 19, and missed out on a gold at Atlanta, and thought ‘Am I ever going to get the chance again . . .?’ I knew how hard it can be to get selected, especially in the UK where we have so much strength and depth in all the classes every time.
Nevertheless I did find some of Ed Wright’s comments to the media in the prelude to that Sydney event more than a little irritating. ‘Ben’s been away doing the America’s Cup and, to be quite honest, he’s not really sailing as well as he has done,’ he told the Independent on Sunday. ‘It’s not a dissimilar situation to Shirley [Robertson]. She went off and did other things with her life for a while and gave that little chance to the other girls, and they stole it away from her. That’s the way it is. This is such a high level in the sport that you can’t just go away and expect to jump straight back in. What happened to Shirley does make me more confident.’
Ed’s comments only served to fire me up even more. If there was a hint of gamesmanship in his dealing with the press then it was severely misjudged and backfired spectacularly.
It wasn’t the first time I’d had that kind of difficult situation. You will always have those rivalries. It’s what spurs you on to train harder. In one way, what he said was good, because it really fired me up to go out and show that I hadn’t lost it. In the Sydney International Regatta, I won six out of the eight races, which settled any argument. Ed didn’t have his best event, finishing fifth, and I got the selection.
I couldn’t feel sorry for him. My job’s to go out there and try and win races. That’s competition. He’s a great sailor, but we’ve got such depth of talent. It’s just a shame we can’t have more than one representative in each class.
From Ed’s point of view, I’m sure it was very disappointing for him, and difficult to accept. In fairness, afterwards he was really good about it; very grown up. You can only respect someone for taking it that way rather than going off in a huff and sulking. He got back into it, and sailed pretty well at the 2008 world championships where I won and he was seventh. He was keen to keep going to 2012, which was a positive way to deal with it.
Disappointment, if you allow it, can be a terribly negative, destructive influence. From my early days, I have used disappointment as a fuel to work harder, improve on what went wrong and not let it happen again. It will no doubt have become apparent by now that I’m a terrible loser. I hate it. I’m better than I used to be, but it still hurts like hell. It’s the biggest motivator there is.
It’s why I try to minimise that by leaving nothing to chance in the build-up to a major regatta like an Olympics or world championships.
Physical preparation is vitally important. Typically, I’ll go and do an aerobics session before or just after breakfast. Then there’s boat maintenance, followed by sailing for three to five hours. By the I time I pack the boat up, it’ll be four or five o’clock. I’ll do weight sessions in the gym in the evening. It’s a full-on day. Not like some sports where you can do a couple of hours in the morning, and that’s it.
You can’t fully replicate on land the demands of sailing in a major event. But by the time of an Olympics or world championships, you need to feel that you’re at your peak, and your body can withstand the rigours to come.
There will always be some weight training, but what I do in the gym depends on the sailing venue, and what the winds are like. Whether I’m trying to increase or decrease my muscle mass, maintain it, or get stronger, or maybe work more on the aerobic side of things, a lot of science goes into it.
We have a strength and conditioning coach, Steve Gent, who puts together a weights programme, depending on conditions. Steve’s a member of the England Institute of Sport team. He works alongside the RYA’s senior sports science officer, Pete Cunningham, to ensure the strength and conditioning training the sailors are doing is sailing-specific. It’s great working with those guys.
Strangely enough, I do enjoy it, especially once I get in a routine. And that’s a word that becomes very important as the Games approach.
Getting the details right is important at an Olympics. Even accommodation and food. At Qingdao, the GB team stayed in a hotel rather than the athletes’ accommodation provided. We’d been there the two years previously, and had got to know the hotel staff very well. It was like going home to a family. They were incredibly sweet, and hard-working and caring. We even had our own chef. If that sounds somewhat indulgent, the problem with that was that, while eighty per cent of the team were trying to lose weight, and were happy to have tiny portions of rice with boiled chicken and steamed broccoli, that kind of thing, I was trying to maintain mine.
Everybody else’s food was zero fat. I needed something with more substance to it, as did Bart and Iain. For them, in the Star, like me, weight wasn’t so much an issue. We snuck out to the Italian, or one of the other western-style restaurants in town – there was one particular buffet available at the Shangri-la Hotel that was a great favourite.
Certainly, once it gets to race days, I am very much a creature of routine. I get up at the same time, have a good warm-up and stretch, followed by breakfast.
I get down to the boat well before the race, and always clean the bottom of it; make sure it’s spotless. No, it’s not obsessive-compulsive disorder! For me, it’s just being professional. There could be grease on the boat, anything.
I always leave the beach, or dock, at the same time before the race. I always do the same pre-start routine. I make sure I tick off all the boxes. Then I’m confident I can get on and race. If I didn’t I’d feel unsettled. That is all as important as being fit and tactically prepared.
What irritates me most about competing is returning after a race, and hearing someone say: ‘Oh, I was winning. But then there was a big wind-shift,’ or ‘There was something on the bottom of my boat.’ Well, that’s just nonsense. Just excuses. It’s really irritating. In fact, by inference, it’s insulting to the man who is performing well. Because these are generally controllables. It’s totally down to you. If something breaks on the boat, unless you’re really unfortunate, it’s normally because you haven’t checked something.
That’s why one of my maxims, if you like, is: No Excuses.
Mind you, for a time in the summer of 2008, it did look as though a freak event could give us all an excuse for not racing at all.
A couple of months before the Games, sailing suddenly received an inordinate amount of coverage, even in the ‘popular’ media. The reason? As The Times headline put it: Mutant seaweed may sink sailing hopes at Beijing Olympics. We were informed by Ashling O’Connor, their Olympics correspondent, that ‘They have battled dense smog, strong tides and no wind but now British sailors training for the Beijing Games are contending with mutant seaweed that has invaded the Olympic venue in China. The bright green algae, described as “thick as a carpet”, is making it impossible for dinghies to navigate the course that will host the Olympic regattas in less than two months.’ It was ‘wrapping itself around keels, bringing the boats to a standstill.’
The ‘seaweed’ was believed to have drifted in from the Yellow Sea following recent bad weather. Local fishermen were trying to clear the area, armed only with their nets slung over the side of their small boats. Iain Percy was quoted as saying it was ‘a real concern’. Clearly it was for the BOA, too, with sailing being one of Britain’s strongest events, with nine medal hopes.
I was fortunate. I only heard on the news how bad it was. I’d done a three-week stint at Qingdao in May, and it was just as I and my training partners left that the ‘seaweed’ came in. For people training there in June, it was a major issue. It seriously affected their training. It’s no fun trying to sail through miles and miles of green algae and not getting anywhere. The Chinese worked really hard to clear it up and when we returned in July it had pretty much disappeared.
The training preparation went really well and I was very fortunate to have five great training partners out in China. Ed Wright was already looking towards 2012 and it was great of him to come out and train along with the up-and-coming youth world champion Giles Scott. Andrew Mills, Ed Greg and Mark Andrews, also younger talented sailors, came out and so at all times we had five boats on the water and could hold small-scale races on the Olympic racetrack. It’s great to have new talent coming into the sport and personally I get a big motivation training with these guys as they’re so enthusiastic and are really into their fitness.
People assume that we always sail in some wonderful pristine environment. It’s not always the case. Sydney Harbour, of course, has its ferries. But undoubtedly the filthiest waters I’ve ever encountered were in Rio Harbour, which is festooned with loads of rubbish, the result of massive tidal rips. You encounter it all: pieces of furniture, oil drums, dead cats, all floating around.
That said, I think we can be pretty confident of 2012 and the sailing venue of Weymouth in the summer of that year. The weather could be anything, but I can vouch for the fact that it is an excellent sailing location, providing a good and fair test.
But back to Qingdao. I was aware that by the time I had reached the sailing venue I was more than just a strong favourite. According to some in the media and, I believe, the bookmakers, who had made me well odds-on, I just had to turn up and, a week later, collect my medal.
You must always have a massive respect for the opposition. I knew that, in these light, difficult conditions, there were four or five guys, like myself, who had been in the class for a good period of time, and would make their experience count. The Spaniard Rafa Trujillo had won the silver at Athens; the Dane, Jonas Christensen had won the world championships in 2006; the Greek Emilios Papathanasiou had been in the world top three for four years. He was really good in the light airs, also.
There were also new, younger faces coming through who were pushing really hard and presented a threat: the Croatian representative, Ivan Kljakovic; the American, Zach Railey; Dutchman Pieter-Jan Postma. Also my old French adversary, Guillaume Florent, was back for another shot at the title.
Including myself, there were about ten of us who had the ability to win a medal in Qingdao. On their day, if they sailed really well, and, just as crucially, you didn’t get it right, they could beat you. It really was very open.
That’s why I knew I must be one hundred per cent prepared, and do everything properly, in terms of the equipment and getting my fitness honed. That was the only way I was going to win that event. Not by just turning up and cruising.