sport news Jim Ratcliffe has zero tolerance for bulls***. If you're off your game, you're ... trends now

There aren’t many who can lay their hands on more gold than Sir Ben Ainslie, but he’s thinking back to the day he found one. It still makes him smile.

‘It was a great gin and tonic,’ Ainslie tells Mail Sport, and with it comes the origin story of his relationship with Sir Jim Ratcliffe.

The year of that drink was 2018, the place was the private members club at 5 Hertford Street in Mayfair and to date the tab is running somewhere close to £250million.

‘It was a mutual friend who got us together,’ Ainslie adds. ‘I mean, there’s maybe only a handful of people you meet in your lifetime and come away thinking, “Wow, that person was really impressive”. You can immediately see how that person has had success and that was the case with Jim.

‘It was just one of those conversations. It wasn’t just sailing – it was about sport, business, the challenges he has taken on. He is a fascinating person to just sit with and shoot the breeze. He was clearly interested in what we had going on, our plans, and very quickly afterwards he came back to me and it took off from there. Here we are.’

Here is Barcelona and the point of interest has long-since developed into their shared obsession with breaking British sport’s longest losing streak at the America’s Cup.

We are sitting in Ainslie’s office, a matter of months until they learn if their second crack at a 173-year-old prize has been more successful than the first. On the wall is the torch Ainslie carried on the opening leg of the mass relay ahead of London 2012, where he won his fourth Olympic gold medal, and beneath is a framed copy of Ratcliffe’s wheel of terms he likes and those he does not.

Among the latter is ‘winging it’, which might sting a few who find themselves now working under him at Manchester United. There’s also ‘things that break down’, so there might also be some awkwardness around the training yacht downstairs that caught fire a weeks before we met.

There have been setbacks on this campaign, and indeed the previous one, to the extent it would be a significant upset if INEOS Britannia rule the waves this October. But the ship requires less turning than the one Ratcliffe acquired at United and Ainslie has been watching those developments with a sense of deja vu.

‘It's straight out of the Jim Ratcliffe playbook - get in there, figure out the issues,’ he says. ‘I mean, the speed of some of the key personnel coming in, that's the sort of action Jim takes. I’ve got no doubt they’ll have a massive impact. They're determined to get Man United back up to the top and it will happen.’

Maybe. If Ratcliffe has learnt anything in his sporting ventures from the America’s Cup and cycling to Formula 1 and football, it is that success and the biggest budgets do not always share a linear relationship. But Ainslie has a far better idea than most about what is like to work with Britain’s richest man and paints a fascinating picture of a ‘no bull****’ partner who is anything but silent.

He starts with a story about the last edition of the Cup, in 2021, when Ainslie’s crew was crushed 7-1 by the Italians in the final of the challenger series.

‘Jim just seems to have this way of cutting through bull****. He has this innate ability to know where the issues are and if you are not on your game he will see through that and then you are in trouble. I think like anyone else, you don’t want any bull****, but Jim Ratcliffe has zero tolerance for it.

‘We had a moment (at the Cup in 2021, in New Zealand) where it was obvious we were going into the event on the backfoot,’ he says. ‘I remember there was a meeting and an impression had been given that things were okay. At that stage, Jim had to make a massive commitment to come down to Auckland to be with us and this was during Covid, so he was making this big effort with quarantine and everything else.

‘I called him after the meeting and said, “Look, if you're going to come down here you need to know our backs are really against the wall”. And he was great with that. He was like, “I'm coming down and I want to try and help you guys sort this out”. You couldn’t ask for a better response.

‘When you’re straight with him, things just happen and they move fast. He gets involved and when he does, he doesn’t half-arse anything. I think he has just been drawn into the intensity of sport, any sport, and he is driven by it. He loves it.