KEY POINTS:
Every now and then in sport, you meet some outstanding people - not just good athletes but good, honest, plain old salt of the earth Kiwis who leave you with a marked impression because of their intelligence or personality or both.
People like, let me see, Sean Fitzpatrick, Ian Ferguson and Paul MacDonald, Ann Audain, John Walker, Rod Dixon (for very different reasons), John Kirwan, Richard Loe, John Hart, Mark Todd, Grant Dalton, Bruce Kendall, Paul Kingsman, Anthony Mosse and more.
Add Tom Ashley to the list. He's a fair bit younger than anyone else mentioned above and that's a big part of it. He's only 24 but has a wise old head on those young shoulders.
Ashley is what you call driven. There's been a fair bit made of his intensity and focus on his sport and his training and the way he aimed himself at a gold medal in Qingdao - and it's all true.
"I worked out before the regatta that if you had an average of fifth place in every race, you would win the gold medal," he said. "And that's exactly what happened."
That's Tom Ashley to a T. Every move thought out, planned and executed with precision. He won only one race in the 10-race series to find the top 10 sailors to contest the medal race. But that wasn't the game plan.
Try to win every race in Qingdao's light and treacherous airs and you soon come a cropper. Like Holland's Casper Bouman, a respected boardsailor. He won two races to Ashley's one but his other placings were, apart from a second and a fourth, two 20ths, 27th, 22nd, 21st and 21st.
Ashley, a long way out from this regatta, decided to forgo the death or glory stuff. Instead, he would sail within himself, sail conservatively and consistently and rack up the points. In his first seven races, he finished no further back than seventh. While others were experiencing giddy ups and depressing downs, Ashley stayed constant.
It's a good guide to his personality. This is not your average sportsman. His thinning blond hair and slender, tall frame accommodate a keen, analytical intelligence and a drive for success.
I met him back in April when I interviewed him for the Herald on Sunday. We arranged a meeting down at Takapuna beach where he was training before heading off to Valencia for more training.
Nothing was too much trouble. He wanted to know exactly what photographer Doug Sherring and I needed. No problem there, clarity is good.
We were toying with the idea of getting Doug in the water and shooting up as Ashley whizzed past in his RS:X board. He didn't much like the idea as it might interfere with his training. See? Driven. No problem there because we discovered we didn't have an underwater camera anyway.
Then, in talking to him, it became apparent that this was a thinker. Windsurfers are usually dudes with blond locks and baggy shorts who say things like "dude", "awesome" and "man" a lot and for whom looking cool is cool, dude.
Ashley doesn't go for all that stuff. He's more into excellence. He doesn't go windsurfing for fun any more but he loves competition and - get this - he loves training.
Told you he was different. So we chat some more and the languages come out. He can speak Portuguese, Spanish and French - and he learned the Spanish when he was banged up with an injury. Most of us would surrender to the inevitable and watch Back To The Future reruns while sucking on blueberry smoothies and putting our feet up. But Ashley? He learns Spanish.
And there's not a hint of how-clever-am-I in all this. It just is. He does what he does.
He plans. He's not scared to part from the crowd. While the rest of the boardsailing world was sailing in regattas and keeping an eye on each other, he blew those off in favour of a strict training regime in Auckland and Valencia, the latter designed to replicate Qingdao's light and tricky breezes.
He isn't saying if this is the end of his competitive career but somehow it's doubtful. He wants to go to university and study law. It seems appropriate. He plans like a lawyer and he analyses his sport, well, like a lawyer, and then executes.
He also played down his world champion status and his gold medal favouritism for all he was worth.
"Well, you don't want to go out there talking about what you are going to do because it could all go wrong and you look like an ass," was his assessment and very Kiwi it is too. Do it rather than talk about it. Talk about it when you've done it.
If all this makes him sound a bit humourless, he isn't. Driven people, with intense focus, can be a bit, well, dry but Ashley obviously loves his sport and the people in it. While he was waiting for the medal ceremony, several of the boardsailors came up to him and hugged him. Ashley later spoke about the warmth and the friendship shared by the boardsailors - and the friendship and kinship was obvious; a good advertisement for sport. Last year, when a group of windsurfers from the professional circuit competed against Ashley and his rivals, he found them to be a group who had an air of high self-importance. So he took to sailing with a toy hippo fixed to the front of his board and then a My Little Pony.
He also earned the wrath of a Canadian rival when, as he sometimes does, he trailed objects behind his board to increase the drag and to make his training duels more even; building more strength and competence in pressure situations. The rival did not take kindly to this, complaining afterwards that what Ashley had done had actually given him lift, not drag - even though the physics made it unlikely.
But you can understand the Canadian's complaint. After all, if Tom Ashley is doing it, it must be good.
