Surrounded by hundreds of children and thousands of well-wishers, three of Great Britain's Olympic medal-winners were back in home waters yesterday. For Pippa Wilson (gold in the Yngling class) and Nick Rogers (silver in the 470), this is where it all began and it was apt that they were at the Royal Lymington Yacht Club on a Wednesday. Sailing is often accused of being elitist, but “Wednesday junior sailing” welcomes any child to have a go in one of the club boats. It has been running 22 years, having been set up by Jonathan Rogers, Nick's father. It is run by Jenny Wilson, Pippa's mother.

Royal Lymington alone has had 16 sailors selected for the Britain team for Olympics, stretching back to 1948. Ben Ainslie, the club and country's golden boy, who knows a thing or two about what makes a champion, praised the system that has supported him. “From what I've seen and heard, the sailing team is right up there along with the cyclists,” Ainslie said. “The Royal Yacht Association do a really good job.”

But Ainslie, whose success has helped sailing to secure funding equal to any of the Olympic sports, is cautious about any system's chances of creating gold medal-winners as standard. Has sailing got to that point? “Yes and no,” Ainslie said. “I agree with the philosophy of trying to bring through new talent. In some ways it starts too early in that it's forcing young kids who are 10, 12 years old into a direction which could possibly take away some of the fun.

“If you look at the current generation of the Olympic team, they were extremely well supported, but they were also extremely talented, hard-working athletes and that's what makes the difference.”

Those competing against Ainslie often feel that he has a sixth sense for the weather conditions. Ainslie said that although you can train people to get better at this, it was also individual talent. “But I think that it is something inherent with the feel of the boat, the feel of the waves,” he said. “You can't just go and tell them to train hour after hour, they have to develop that themselves and you can't just do that with video analysis.”

Ben Ainslie is an ambassador for BT, an official partner of London 2012. The ambassador programme is part of BT's longstanding commitment to education, coaching and mentoring.