Two golds as Britons rule the waves

Despite the triumph for Robertson, a 32-year-old Scot who said she was thrilled to finally become the "bride rather than the bridesmaid", it was Ainslie's performance which was tonight being hailed as one of the most virtuoso sails in the Games' annals. Olympic sailing manager Glenn Bourke reckoned his duel with Scheidt was like "Coe versus Ovett on water".

Ainslie is the young gun of the Laser, the most popular dinghy class in the world, and Scheidt is the old master, having won the world title four times.

In Atlanta four years ago, the gold had come down to the final race and Scheidt had outmanoeuvred the Briton so that he ended up being disqualified.

Here, the tables were turned as they came down, after one week and 10 races, to one final joust. "It was the most dramatic race of my life," said Ainslie, while his coach John Derbyshire insisted nothing had ever been seen like it in modern-day sailing.

Ainslie had been lying nine points behind going into the last race and knew that, under the scoring system where each sailor is allowed to discard his worst two race scores, there were only two ways he could win. One was to beat Scheidt by 11 places in the 36-strong fleet, wholly unlikely knowing the Brazilian's pedigree.

The other way, though, was to try to force the Brazilian to finish 20th or worse. So Ainslie adopted tactics which Derbyshire described as "ruthless and clinical".

He dipped underneath Scheidt as they jostled for position at the start, forced him into an illegal manoeuvre which held up the Brazilian and then inched ahead slowly, covering his opponent's boat like a blanket so that Scheidt could not earn the right of way nor have any wind to work with.

He stalled the Brazilian and forced him out wide in the harbour, leaving the rest of the fleet to forge ahead. It made for amazing scenes with the two craft dicing with each other and even colliding at the start. Later, Scheidt hit Ainslie's boat when he tried to force his way through even though he did not have the right of way. He was dis-qualified for this foul hours later.

The episode was akin to watching Damon Hill trying to keep Michael Schumacher at bay - only at the back of the field. What looked like a dirty tricks campaign was, in fact, an astonishingly skilful blocking tactic. Scheidt had successfully tried this on Ainslie in Atlanta. "It's a case of what goes around comes around," smiled Ainslie. "It's the best I've ever sailed. It wasn't gamesmanship; it was sailing. We were both quite cool. There were no verbals."

By the time Scheidt got past, he could only claw his way back up to the fleet in 22nd place. "I counted the boats in front of him and was relieved to find he was just too far down. I'd used the rules to slow him up," said Ainslie.

"He had got fed up and had no option but to force his way through and by doing that, he broke the rules as far as I'm concerned."

The jury agreed, eventually, after Ainslie had presented his defence against Scheidt's protests against him. Ainslie later received a congratulation note from his old rival and said he was confident they would remain friends. "We just have great battles," he said.

While Ainslie was anxiously awaiting his fate, Robertson was getting her head around the fact that after 15 years of lonely slog, she had finally climbed to the top of the world. A couple of hours earlier, in her penultimate race, she had begun to wonder if, as so often in the past, the big prize would elude her.

She had dominated the week but, suddenly, she had sailed poorly and her closest rival, Margriet Matthysse, from Holland, had climbed within four points.

"With my lead decreasing, I had a bit of a moment and thought I might be blowing it, but my coach gave me a reality check and said, 'Don't be stupid. You're the best out there'," recalled Robertson.

She suffered a sluggish start in the final race, and when Matthysse surged past her into the lead and Robertson dropped back into fifth place, calamity loomed.

But the strong 5ft 6in doughty Scot forced past two more opponents to finish third and to claim the title by just two points.