The advantage of racing on their most regular training and competition waters off Weymouth and Portland in 2012 could hold the key to improving British sailing’s new 100-year record haul of six Olympic medals which Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson completed with the Team GB’s fourth gold medal on Thursday.

At the helm since 2001 of a goldmine Olympic programme which has delivered eleven medals and countless world titles since the start of the Athens 2004 regatta, Stephen Park considers ten medals from the ten classes which will compete in four years time a realistic expectation, but he warns that steps must me taken to protect and maximise all the competitive advantages inherent to racing on home waters.

It is a measure of the exceptional team spirit and dedication that only hours after an appropriately high octane night of celebration, the full sailing team complement - including all ten medallists - were on duty together in the Friday afternoon’s heat and humidity to stow boats and equipment. Were packing shipping containers a medal sport Britain’s sailors would have topped the international table too.

Mutual support is freely and equally given whether it is in the long hours of disappointment after missing out on an expected medal, such as afflicted young 2007 49er world champions Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes, or Athens bronze medallist Nick Dempsey, or it is sharing the fleeting moments of extreme elation welcoming ashore victors and victrixes, gold standard bearers Ainslie, Goodison, Percy and Mitchell and the Yngling girls Ayton, Webb and Wilson.

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Such traits of a winning team are spontaneous but they form an important part of the sailing Team GB’s psychological armoury, just as the visibility of having the best on-shore infrastructure, team hotel location, coaches, technical innovations and meteorological information have all been vital to success in Qingdao, Athens and Sydney.

Team GB were the only sailors in China’s sixth biggest city to have their own branded mini-buses waiting at the venue gates day and night, saving on athletes’ waiting time.

Since 2005, for three to eight weeks at a time they have had their own private wing of a large hotel set up as ’Little Britain’ three miles away from the hubbub of the sailing venue, guarded by their own security, Scouse chef making food shipped from the UK, masseurs, nutritionists, physiologist, BBC TV feed.

Bear in mind that half of Britain’s four golds - Percy and Simpson’s Star, and Goodison’s Laser - were won from straight head-to-head scraps with Sweden.

Other teams try to copy the winning British model, but for the third successive Games the British were the only team not to pack boats away as soon as their classes finished competition. Instead all the GBR craft stay in position in the compound so that the athletes still focused on competing do not feel the regatta tapering off.

This year Australia, second in the medal table, tried but could not resist the temptation after their Yngling and RS:X prospects imploded due to schoolboy errors.

Through the second week, after his third gold medal was wrapped up, Ainslie was on the slipway each afternoon to help haul boats, to give a consoling man-hug or help lift the victorious Paul Goodison, still aboard his Laser dinghy, all the way up the slipway, just as his GB team-mates did when he won his first gold in Sydney 2000.

The RYA Skandia Team GBR programme budget is £2 million per year, topped up by sponsorship funding, while campaigns such as the Yngling - which ran four boats in excess of £30,000 each - fund between 40 and 50 per cent of costs through their own personal sponsors.