KEY POINTS:
Every day, on the way to his gold medal, Tom Ashley would stop at the Bei An cafe for a coffee.
It was part of the routine and a kind of statement. If music accompanied this daily interlude, it would be Frank Sinatra's My Way, appropriate not only because Ashley has eyes of similar colour to Ol Blue Eyes but also because he most definitely did it his way.
Ashley separated himself from the Olympic village. It was all part of the plan, to behave as he did in most other regattas and take the tension out of it.
So, every day, he'd get from the Qingdao hotel where he stayed with a few others, including boardsailing coach Grant Beck, to the yachting venue. He didn't much look like a gold medallist in the making - shorts, jandals and no team uniform.
It's not how it is supposed to be. He was meant to be in the village, being a part of the team. But yachting team management, headed by Russell Green, decided to let Ashley prepare as he wanted.
It was the right call. Every day, Ashley would collect his thoughts, stroll to the Bei An, order coffee, collect his thoughts some more and settle on the day's game plan.
"It was really important to me," says Ashley. "It is really quite easy to get sucked into the whole Olympic thing and get diverted from what you are trying to do. It is more stressful than other regattas, so of course you can't withdraw yourself from it totally.
"Everyone is here and you get all the media all over the regatta, which doesn't normally happen, and it is a totally different game. So you need to minimise that and make it more manageable."
So that explains how we come to be sitting in the Bei An, drinking coffee, while the cafe manager is poncing about, wearing Ashley's gold medal, being admired by a large crowd of Chinese passers-by.
Ashley's casual divestment of his medal is a signal the Bei An is home and the staff just folks. But the planning and intense focus for which Ashley is famous went beyond these preparations. It affected his life, pretty much 24 hours a day, for four years.
He trained seven hours a day with a couple of days rest a week. Everything was mapped out - his training hours, food and fluid intake, right down to "no more than a couple of beers a week".
"When you are training that hard, it affects all the rest of your life. Even on your rest days, you want to make sure you are eating right and resting right so you don't undo the good work."
Ashley also planned his training campaign and his peaking for Qingdao like a military operation. While many of his rivals were taking part in regattas around Europe and elsewhere, he was training at Takapuna beach and at Valencia, where the light airs closely resembled those of Qingdao.
He also worked out with training partners like Brazilian former world champion Ricardo Santos, who is a friend. They would hammer away at each other, working on their strengths and weaknesses. Santos finished fifth in Qingdao.
"The other thing about regattas is that you end up with really high-intensity exercise."
It is strength-sapping and he is in no doubt that many of his rivals in Qingdao had peaked too early.
In January, when he was outgunned at a regatta, he didn't feel much like a gold medal winner. That's when the planning and preparation kicked in. Ashley's goal was to peak in August, and everything - training, meals, strategy of consistency rather than trying to win every race and staying separate from the yachting team - was aimed at that.
"I knew those other guys would probably peak too early and, from the first day of this regatta, I was much better than I had been in January and they were much worse."
With his life mapped out and targeted towards that gold medal for four years, Ashley now professes not to know what to do with the rest of his life.
He and Brazilian fiancée Mariana are to marry in January at her hometown near Rio de Janeiro. They will make New Zealand their home.
"That's right, I'm going to have to find somewhere to live," says Ashley. He doesn't know if he will be house-hunting.
So much for the arch-planner and arch-strategist, then. That all ended on August 20, 2008, when his four-year quest for a gold medal ended.
Right now, looking forward only to a break, Tom Ashley is as disorganised and unprepared as the rest of us.
Except for one thing - and he retrieves it from the cafe manager and stows it in his backpack. It's gold sheen manages to escape just a little before the zip locks it in.
