It can’t be easy being Giles Scott, British Olympian, Finn class favourite, and long-term heir to the golden wetsuit. Not yet anyway, and perhaps a little less so after a frustrating start to Rio 2016 that saw Scott finish 17th in a messy, slightly bedraggled first race. A little later in the day Scott flexed his ripping champion’s shoulders and gained a foothold in what seems likely to be a volatile Olympic competition with an encouraging third place. “It was a disappointing day,” he said afterwards. “But it’s not going to be easy for anyone out there.”
On the plus side a little adversity is nothing new for Britain’s semi-undercover triple world champion. He is unbeaten in two years and up there with the most compelling British gold medal favourites but it remains a slightly galling state of affairs that Scott is still best known in the wider world for not being Ben Ainslie.
Not being Ben has been a defining note from Scott’s first world title in 2001 to narrow defeat at Ainslie’s hands in the 2012 Olympic eliminator, since when good judges have suggested Scott, a brilliantly ruthless power-sailor, would have walked his way to gold at London 2012. Instead he spent that long Olympic week on a booze-ridden bender around Weymouth, torn between supporting his team, which he did, and feeling the emptiness of a rising athlete denied a spot on the grid by the last bed‑blocking hurrah of a great champion.
Here there was plenty of mitigation for that disappointing start. The course is difficult and the winds capricious. All the medal favourites suffered an off-day in some form. Scott will be back. Watching him whip his dinghy into shape on the quayside early in the day, stripped to the waist in the mid‑afternoon sun to reveal that famously slabbed and intimidating physique, it was his renowned air of calm self-possession that stood out.
It was a beautiful opening day all round at Rio’s downtown marina, that bleached-out winter sun bathing this fabled course in hot white light. For all the gripes over venues, this is one of the great sailing courses, a natural marina framed in the armpit of one of the world’s most spectacular seafront cities.
The media preoccupation with effluent has been an enduring feature of the wider build-up. Often overlooked is that the locals, including the elite Rio de Janeiro Yacht Club, sail here all the time without drowning in sewage. Worse, they say, are the surprisingly common dead dogs bobbing just below the surface.
The current mild stench is an improvement in any case. At the test event the entire complex was thick with the hum of rot and crud, eventually traced to a sewer outlet next to the start. In a rare show of foresight and good sense the organising committee decided this did not look too good and re-routed it.
On Tuesday, the first race began with a muddle, the Dutchman Pieter-Jan Postma corkscrewing himself into a whirlpool just trying to get going.
This is a famously tricky place to sail, described by Ainslie as “far and away the most complex in the world”. The Rio geography causes its own hazards, with the Sugarloaf at one end and the mountains the other. The wind dies and then bubbles up again. The tides are tetchy. At times the boat can simply stop, wedged between the push-and-pull of two equal but opposed walls of water and wind.
Turkey’s Alican Kaynar was first to the opening mark of the competition, with Scott already struggling at the back. Steadily the wind picked up a couple of knots. By the time the field reached the final mark Facundo Olezza Bazan of Argentina was out in front, having taken an outrageous alternative course at one stage, with Scott still lodged towards the back of the pack, struggling to find a line in some strong and testy gusts.
A mystic, wind-reader’s grasp of conditions was Ainslie’s great strength at times like these but Scott has his own decisive qualities. Never mind not being Ben, the two are different in many ways. Ainslie was always a boat kid from a boat family, raised around the water and simply following his nose into the top-class end of the sport. Scott is a relative outsider who showed his racing talent on recreational courses as a boy and was simply too good not to be drawn in. If the two men share a natural aggression – there was some voluble ill-feeling between the pair as the young Scott emerged in competition – they are physically very distinct.
Scott is a classic 6ft 5in power-athlete while Ainslie always fought his own slighter frame in a discipline that demands huge physical strength. The heavy dinghy boats used in this race are an intimidating prospect in their own right, with a huge aluminium boom that wrenches around on the water. The sailors who step into them tend to be from the bulked-up warrior caste, second-row forwards with the light touch and tactical nose of a downhill free-wheel grand prix driver.
The emergence of this beefier breed was one reason Ainslie felt his own time coming to an end, although here, where he won so many memorable races, his best qualities, with a nose always for the right line and angle, might just have been a telling asset.
Scott was 10th after the first day, a fairly meaningless register at this stage with eight races to come. But it will be his ability to read these testing conditions that will decide a competition where most still expect him to surge to the front, so supreme has his form been against the same field. A fast start will be key, as it was to his improvement late in the afternoon.
Scott laughed and said: “I guess I’ll have to” when he was asked if he could show the same fighting qualities as Ainslie. He looked nonplussed at the suggestion there might have been some nerves at his first Olympic race. Yet he will be aware he needs a gold medal to emerge fully from that shadow, not least as the Finn has been in Britain’s possession ever since Iain Percy won it at Sydney 2000. For all the lingering ghosts, not to mention the vicissitudes of sailing, this maligned, pungent, terribly beautiful marina, it would be foolish to bet against him.
