The Times Magazine 13A word on the team: there are about
96 going to New Zealand. There is Sam Haines,
the soft-spoken Australian sailmaker, who
tells me how the £900,000 mainsail has to
be laminated in zero humidity in the Nevada
desert before being airfreighted to the UK (and
then to New Zealand). Every time the boat
goes out, he spends three hours checking his
sail for wear and tear. There is Max Starr, the
CFD (computational fluid dynamics) engineer,
who, as a child, could program before he could
talk and whose role is best described as the
equivalent of James Bond’s Q. There is a head
of rigging, a dedicated crane operator, whose
job it is to rotate that precious cargo from
dock to sea. There’s a medic, who trained with
the Special Boat Service.
Up in his office, Ainslie is wearing the Ineos
team clobber and moves with a slight stiffness,
like Action Man, folding himself onto a sofa.
In no way could he be described as a big talker.
On the boat, his job as helmsman is tactics and
strategy. He instructs crew – the grinders, sail
trimmer and pilot – through a headset mic,
describing the sea, the wind, the course.
The grinders, who are head down incockpits, are unable to feel the wind. Their
experience of speed comes from the rising
numbers on their digital display and the
noise that whistles round the 78ft mast. Carr
describes the sound as eerie. “Kind of like an
action movie where they turn up high the
pitch in the bass,” he says. “The faster you’re
going, the more intense and greater the sound
effects around you.” Ainslie speaks over this,
his tone locking them in focus. At the stern,
he’s more exposed to the elements. The wind
pipes past his ears, sometimes coming across
the deck at 70mph. “It’s a bit like driving down
the motorway and sticking your head out of
the window,” he says.
At these speeds, decisions are split-second.
Before foiling existed in races, “You had time
to think about your strategy, your next tactical
move. Now it’s so fast, you react instantly.”
The crew have been trained by special
forces personnel, working on “team-building,
cohesion and culture”.
I ask about his famous hair-trigger temper
in competition and he laughs, looks away and
rubs his chin. “One thing, and this got me into
trouble a few times in the past, was having
a reaction,” he says. He couldn’t let things
“linger”; he had to “get it out and move on”.
Is he explosive?
“Maybe. Maybe.” His eyes move around the
room, then come back to me. “When I started
getting competitive, if something went wrong,
or I wasn’t happy, yeah, I’d have a bit of a
meltdown. You learn quickly that’s not helping
you race. You have to get better at dealing
with things.”
His late father, Roddy, once told the story
of how, aged 11, Ainslie was racing a 15-year-
old girl and got so competitive, as he drew
close to her, he shouted, “F*** off, Granny,”
causing the spectating parents a horrified
sharp inhalation of breath.
More recently, he “snapped” at a
cameraman who he said kept getting in his
way during the single-handed Finn world
championships in 2011. He leapt off his dinghy
and swam over to the boat carrying the TV
crew to remonstrate after finishing second.
“We had a bit of an altercation,” he says. “I
guess I have a limit, and now and again...” It’s
breached? “Yes. I like to think I’m not someone
who just smashes through things or people
without looking back. I think I am considerate
enough that if I have stepped over the line,
I’ll put my hands up and make amends.”
Amends-making in this case included being
packed off to see a psychologist, an experience
he found “stressful”. “I remember having this
amusing conversation where the psychologist
said, ‘You look quite stressed. Why is that?’
So, I explained the whole story. And the
psychologist said, ‘Well, what are you going to
do about that?’ Which is the classic line. And
I thought, ‘What do you mean? What can I doabout it? That’s why I’m here. Tell me what
I can do.’ I found the process quite frustrating.”
Did he argue with the psychologist? “Um...
I thought, ‘I need to get through this [process].’
God knows what she thought. She probably
thought, ‘This guy is a lunatic.’ ”
In all, he decides, this therapy wasn’t
helpful. And anyway, working in a crew of
11 means he can’t lose his temper now. “Your
team have to be on the same wavelength and
if you’re that intense and aggressive, it doesn’t
work. You have to drop your intensity levels a
bit to match the rest of the team.”
I suggest that he’s an optimist and he
demurs, saying his wife, the sports presenter
Georgie Thompson, would “definitely not”
describe him as such. “But I don’t know
how to describe myself. If there’s a challenge,
I think, ‘OK, how do we get through this?’ If
things aren’t going well, I want to sort them.
I’m not happy to just let things pass, which
means I can sometimes get a bit intense
and focused. Georgie would say I get a little
too engrossed.” Obsessive? “Yeah, maybe
obsessive. Something like that.” He laughs.
He’s now surrendered to the chaos of
fatherhood. He has a four-year-old daughter,
Bellatrix (after Harry Potter? “Yes”), and got
stuck in with nappies “and wild wees”, whatever
they are, but Georgie gets nervous if he goes
in the kitchen. His plan to propose to her over
a special birthday dinner was almost derailed
when she freaked at the idea of him cooking.
Ainslie was sailing with his parents as
far back as he remembers. On his eighth
birthday he woke up to a dinghy in his
bedroom – 8ft long and made of plywood with
a bumper ring around it: “a glorified bathtub”.
He still remembers “vividly” being plopped
into it in his wellies, having the rope tossed
to him and being told to meet his parents at
the pub. To the chagrin of his sister, Fleur- three years older and also a sailor – he
became exceptionally good. Soon family life
revolved around his competitions. “There was
a point when my dad said, ‘If you want this, to
race internationally and, who knows, maybe
go to the Olympics, you’ve got to focus, take it
seriously. Because it’s a massive commitment
for the rest of us. If you’re going to mess
around, don’t expect our support.’ ”
The AC75s are dangerous. You cannot
sail something that big, that fast without
running the razor’s edge of safety. But, says
Ainslie, it is rigorously tested, rigged with
thousands of sensors and strain gauges. “If
there’s an issue, alarms start going off.”
In addition, crew undergo military-level
safety training. “If you crash when you touch
down [from flying on the foils], it’s high-impact.
We all have helmets, body armour and breathing
apparatus.” Safety kit weighs 5kg – the life
jackets have impact protection, much like
downhill mountain bikers wear – and crew
HE WAS SENT TO SEE A
PSYCHOLOGIST. ‘I FOUND
THE PROCESS FRUSTRATING.
SHE PROBABLY THOUGHT,
THIS GUY IS A LUNATIC’