Can The British Return To Olympic Sailing Glory?

In whatever sport you care to consider, all winning streaks eventually come to an end. In the case of the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) and its dominance of Olympic sailing, the streak had gone on so long, it had become a given.

Britain, it seemed, really did rule the waves. It finished either top nation, or the team with the most medals in six consecutive Olympics, starting when National Lottery funding first came in at Sydney in 2000 and continuing all the way to Tokyo 20 years later.

During that time British sailors collected 29 medals all together and, with the exception of Rio in 2016 (when the team won two golds and a silver), walked away with five medals at every Games apart from Qingdao in 2008 when they pocketed six.

It was a remarkable run that made the careers of some of Britain's greatest modern racing yachtsmen and women, among them Ben Ainslie, Iain Percy, Paul Goodison, Giles Scott, Shirley Robertson and Hannah Mills. And in the run-up to the Paris Games last year the signs were that the streak was going to continue. At the test event for the Marseilles Olympic regatta one year out from the Games, the British team came away with five medals.

But then came something that the RYA could not cope with – an Olympic regatta dominated by a massive high pressure system that saw races cancelled or sailed in vanishingly light winds and an event when the form book in the build-up went out the window.