Until recently, YouTube featured a clip of Ben Ainslie and a Greek sailor before the start of an international Gold Cup race. Ainslie is blocking the Greek, legitimately, just messing him around, and the Greek is standing in his boat, swearing at the British sailor, who is blithely untroubled by the show of aggression. This is Ainslie at work, the quiet and modest double gold medallist in his element, psyching out an opponent before sailing off into the distance.

The sequence drew a laugh from Stephen Park, manager of the Skandia Team GBR sailing squad, because it was exactly the Ainslie he knew, the ruthless competitor who most don’t see but who, in Beijing, will assume the role of Olympic talisman patented by Steve Redgrave. Ainslie has not just to win but to win with an assurance, panache and charm which reflects a long lost sporting tradition. Most of all, he must win because he always wins. But don’t try telling Park about Gentleman Ben. That’s a character he doesn’t recognise.

“When he pushes off from the dock, Ben’s behaviour is entirely different,” says Park. “If someone has wound him up, he can be frustrated, outspoken and angry off the water, but as soon as the clock strikes 12 and he has to race he is a different person. Bang, off he goes, he pulls the shutters down.

“Yes, his technique, his tactics and his physiology are right, but his great strength is his ability to focus on the important things now, in the next 10 seconds, the next 10 minutes, the next hour. That’s an incredible talent.”

The medal race for the recent European Championships in the Finn class proved beyond doubt what Park has suspected all along: that, like Redgrave before him, Ainslie has established such a mental dominance over the rest of the Finn fleet they collude in their own downfall. How else can you explain that last day when the 31-year-old started eight points behind the Frenchman, Guillaume Florent. Ainslie had to win the race and put four places between him and the leader. Florent was the unfortunate opponent who had caused Ainslie’s disqualification from a critical race in Athens, so Ainslie needed no extra incentive to go hunting.

“I used the prestart to wind him up a bit,” Ainslie recalls. “I managed to get a good start and sailed well. It was a good situation to be in, playing catchup not just defending a lead.

“Subconsciously, that sharpens your senses, you’ve got to fight for every place and if you’re able to come back you gain that extra bit of confidence.” No need to explain what happened next. Ainslie drew a penalty from the Frenchman, then sailed through the fleet to take the title.

So you ask Park what sets Ainslie apart from the rest. It’s not, he says, anything physical. Ainslie is good at pumping weights, but his teammate and fellow Finn sailor, Ed Wright, is much better and Wright, who was beaten in a controversial sail-off for the Olympic place, has never beaten Ainslie competitively.

The ergometer, the indoor rowing machine that measures pain threshold as much as physical capability, provides a clue.

Ainslie is not the most powerful, but he pushes himself the hardest.

“It’s the pain,” explains Park. “In the Finn, you’ve got 100kg of bodyweight with your toes under the straps and thighs pressed against the sides of the boat. If you or I did that for two or three minutes we’d be doing well. These guys are doing it for a whole race. But Ben is able to push himself through the normal pain barrier.”

Ainslie, alone among his class, views sailing as a combat sport, not all the t i m e , but when necessary. His extraordinary tango with Robert Scheidt, the brilliant Brazilian, in the final race for the gold medal in Sydney was described as more like boxing than sailing. That day, Ainslie outpsyched the older champion and assumed domination of the whole fleet.

He has not loosened his grip once in the past eight years, despite spending half of the last Olympic cycle sailing with the New Zealand America’s Cup team in Valencia. He competed in just two qualifying regattas in Qingdao, venue for the Games, and a world championships, winning them all, the latter from a ranking of 75. “It was, like: ‘Ah, here comes Ben on his holidays’,” says Park. “Then he’d win the gold and it was, ‘Well, thanks, boys, keep working hard’.”

But you will search in vain for any sign of the self-belief spilling over into complacency in Ainslie. No possible tweak or experiment has been ignored in his relentless quest for supremacy. At a recent regatta, Ainslie noticed that one of his rivals was testing a new piece of kit. Ainslie smiled quietly to himself having been down the same road and ended up in a cul-de-sac. “I knew that wasn’t the golden bullet,” he explains.

“I wasn’t feeling, ‘Oh, maybe we should have tried that’, which gave me peace of mind. Then it’s just a question of getting on with the racing.

“You set your own goals and ambitions and the fear of failure drives you on towards realising them. It may look from the outside that I’m dominant, but it’s a lot closer than that and I’m hugely aware that I have to keep pushing the whole time.

“For this Olympics, I could just stick with the same equipment and have a good shot of winning, but I knew I needed to work through some technical ideas and tick them off, knowing I’d done the work.” Add meticulousness to the qualities of a double Olympic champion.

Yet none of this truly attempts to answer the more fundamental question. Given the same piece of equipment, a 14ft 10in (4.3m) Finn boat, and with the current level of professionalism in the fleet, the same development programmes, how is it that Ainslie seems to be able to sail so much quicker than his rivals?

“It’s down to great seamanship,” explains Park. “Yes, Ben has great strategic and tactical acumen, but he sees the wind and the waves in a slightly different way from the others. He’s a very quick decision-maker. It’s like The Matrix, while one person is seeing a room and people, another is seeing all the particles. Ben sees the breath of wind nobody else sees and because he’s such a physical sailor he’s able to catch a wave others have missed. Then he gets a boat length ahead, then by the first mark he’s four boat lengths up and the opportunities are coming to him before everyone else. Then everybody else is sailing for second.

“When he was young, he used to be very aggressive on the water. He was seen as a bit of an upstart, shouting and swearing at his seniors. He was just channelling his frustrations, but now he’s more controlled. Mostly on the water he goes about his business quietly, until someone riles him. Like the Greek bloke, Ben was just reeling him in.”

The fear for Park and his team, which includes the double world champion Yngling crew skippered by Sarah Ayton, Paul Goodison in the Laser and Ben Rhodes and Stevie Morrison in the 49ers, all good medal prospects, is the potentially fickle conditions in Qingdao. If a calm settles over the coast, races could be shortened and the schedule curtailed, turning the whole regatta into a lottery. The squad have set themselves a target of four medals, which is on the conservative side of realistic for one of Britain’s most successful Olympic sports.

At the age of 31, Ainslie has already committed himself to competing at his home Olympics, if he can balance the demands of a British America’s Cup campaign and his fifth Games. He could be going for his fourth gold by then, his place in the Olympic pantheon assured. Ainslie will presume no such destiny.

His sole ambition is to rule the waves in Qingdao.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

1996:Wins silver at Atlanta Olympic Games in Laser class and gold at European championships

1998:Wins gold at world and European championships. Named world sailor of the year

1999:Defends his world and European titles

2000:Wins gold at Sydney Olympics

2002:Wins gold in Finn class at European championships. Named world sailor of the year

2003:Wins gold at world and European championships

2004:Wins Finn class Olympic gold