Williams wins Danish Open

Ian Williams extended his lead in the current World Match Racing Tour at the weekend when he and his Pindar racing team won the Danish Open. Williams, the current world champion, pulled clear of his nearest rival, Frenchman Mathieu Richard who failed to make the semi-finals.

This was my first trip to one of the match racing events and the Danes were very welcoming hosts. All the crews have identical boats so it really is a test of team work, tactics and helming skills.

There is simply no room for error so every manoeuvre has to be like clockwork. It's more like boxing than racing with umpires following the two-boat races on an end-to-end course that must be rounded twice. This means that spectators have a clear understanding of who is in the lead as the boats converge for each buoy rounding.

In the battle for dominance, however the boats undertake many more manoeuvres than in a fleet race, tacking and back tacking when fighting for position. In the pre-race jostling they sometimes do a series of pirouettes as they try to make the best position on the line.

The tour seems to be attracting increasing interest from potential hosts, not to name some big names in sailing such Magnus Holmberg. A group from a Bahrain bank were visiting this tie, looking at the feasibility of staging an event in Bahrain.

The tour includes stages in Brazil, Germany, Korea, Switzerland and Sweden but has no UK event as yet. This seems odd since the world champion is British. Sooner or later one of the hungrier ports - Cardiff, Liverpool or Hartlepool perhaps - is going to wake up and bid for the event. It beats duck racing.

Danish Open - World Match Racing Tour 2008

I'm packing my bags for Frederikshavn which is hosting the Danish round of the World Match Racing Tour. The plan is to profile Ian Williams, the world match racing champion. I met Ian over a year ago in Antigua where we exchanged life stories while propping up a bar in English Harbour (he's the one in the light coloured cap).

Unfortunately I forgot everything he told me (which might be a good thing). This time I plan to have my notebook and pen with me. During the Beijing Olympics If you saw the way Ben Ainslie was edging out his nearest rival, Zach Railey, in the final race of the Finn class - the one that had to be abandoned and re-run - you could get an idea of how match racing works.

When one yacht is racing another - as they do in the America's Cup - tactics are everything. Often the boat that gets its nose in front first will try to cover any moves by its competitor.

Williams is a master of this kind of sailing. If Ainslie joins the full tour next year as expected, it will make for some exciting head-to-heads. The only reason we have not seen Williams in an Olympic event, incidentally, is that the men's match racing discipline was voted out of the Olympics before Athens in 2004.

It's great that in the UK we have so much to cheer among our medal haul. Yet only Ainslie among the UK Olympic sailors could be said to be anything like a household name, although many of the rest of them, such as Iain Percy, are becoming well known within the sailing fraternity.

It's a reflection of our society, perhaps, that a nonentity such as Jade Goody, famous only because she appeared on a dire mainstream TV programme, would probably garner more recognition in a street survey than any of the UK's Olympic medal-winning sailors.

When a recent street survey was carried out in the US and people were asked if they could name any sailors the top three were: 1. Christopher Columbus, 2.Ted Turner, 3. Popeye!

That's why I want to write about Williams - not that the FT magazine is exactly mainstream - because people of his calibre deserve better recognition outside sailing. He is world champion for goodness sake!

The last time I saw him, incidentally, was during Cowes week when he was heading towards the pontoons after winning the Laser SB3 class. It was so far ahead of the field I couldn't see the second finisher. That's how good he is.