Ben Ainslie has just won his fourth Finn European Championship after an extraordinary week of drama. Those words ‘drama’ and ‘Ben Ainslie’ just shouldn’t appear in the same sentence. This guy is so good, he should be winning these regattas at a stroll. Such is his superiority in the Finn class, it always makes me wonder if he’s really trying when he’s not winning with at least a race to spare.
A bit like his last gasp victory at the Olympic Test Regatta in Qingdao last year, Ainslie had it all to do, going into the Medal Race today. He was 8 points adrift of Guillaume Florent, the Frenchman who has been the surprise leader of this regatta for much of the week. Eight points, or four places (in the double-scoring Medal Race), in a 10-boat fleet is a lot to make up, but not the way Ainslie goes about things.
Ainslie said: “I had a game plan that I had discussed with my coach, Jez Fanstone, to have a bit of a match race with Florent in the pre-start and to try to put him off his game plan. I managed to force him into making a mistake and by halfway down the first beat I could see he wasn’t going so well so I decided to pull the throttle to try to get as big a lead as possible and hope he didn’t pull through.
“This does rank amongst one of my more satisfying victories; it is always nice to win when you have been behind going into the last race,” said Ainslie. I imagine one of the other satisfying aspects of this victory was in knocking Florent off the top of the podium. It was the Frenchman who controversially protested Ainslie in a port/starboard incident at the last Olympics in Athens. The Briton was disqualified, even though TV footage of the port/starboard cross showed more than a little daylight between Ainslie’s transom and Florent’s bow.
Don’t make Ben angry, you won’t like him when he’s angry. Suitably fired up, Ainslie went on to dominate the Olympic Regatta and took Gold in Athens.
So, almost four years later, Ainslie took his revenge in Italy today, while Croatia’s Ivan Gaspic took silver ahead of Florent who was forced to settle for bronze.
Five Gold Cups, four European Championships, three Olympic Medals, two of them Gold. One undeniable truth. Ben Ainslie is the clear, clear favourite for Gold in Qingdao this August.
Except that in each of the three Olympic Games he’s competed in, Ben has always had a terrible start to the regatta. He’s always left his chances of a medal hanging in the balance. Which means that today is unlikely to be the last time that we see those words ‘drama’ and ‘Ben Ainslie’ appear in the same sentence together this summer.
Photo courtesy of James Taylor
Posted in Ben Ainslie, Finn, Olympic Classes | Tags: Ben Ainslie, Finn Europeans, Guillaume Florent, Scarlino
