Misadventure with a happy ending for the most medal-winning Olympic sailor in history. In fact, Sir Ben Ainslie (five of his medals, including four gold and one silver between Finn and Laser) had it rough in the middle of his honeymoon, by boat of course, in the Caribbean.
Ainslie was sailing off the coast of Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands when he was forced to launch an SOS after his yacht found itself at the mercy of the waves due to a mainsail furler failure. A problem that was bringing him dangerously close to the reef. Receiving the call for help, was the owner of Necker Island, that Richard Branson, patron of Virgin, who spoke along with his staff. One of the rescuers climbed to the masthead to trim the sails, preventing the yacht from crashing into the reef.
Now, the honeymoon, will end on the beautiful Caribbean island, as Branson himself tweeted on his Twitter profile, from which the pictures in this article are taken. Because champions are known to fall yes, but always stand.
VIDEO. BRANSON, A KITESURFER AND TWO MODELS…
The champion, adrift among Caribbean atolls with his lady, rescued by one of the richest men on earth. A true fairy tale: from the series, even champions fall, but always stand. Ainslie, who will lead the British team in the upcoming America’s Cup (Max Sirena, skipper of Luna Rossa, recently said that the British team is definitely the most feared and also made even stronger by the support of the royal family, behind the image of Pippa Middelton), he had also found time last December 20 to marry Georgie Thompson, a British television journalist for Sky Sports. The two were aboard the yacht Rita, a Hoek Design Truly Classic 65 recently purchased by the baronet. The name of the new “toy” is not accidental: all of Ainslie’s boats, from Finn to Laser, have always been named Rita. The Hoek Design Truly Classic 65 is a hull that takes the elegance of 1930s sailing ships and combines it with evolved hull lines characteristic of modern hulls. So the baronet went from dinghies to a 65-foot yacht, via the San Francisco victory with Oracle that brought him into the firmament of champions with a capital C and certainly afforded him the luxury, financially speaking, of taking a few indulgences.
