I've been spending a lot of time out in Valencia recently reporting on the America's Cup, and it's been good to see how many faces there are from the dinghy sailing scene. Dinghy sailors still make the best keelboat sailors and nearly all the key decision makers at the back of the Cup boats have a background in small boat sailing of some sort, most of them in Olympic campaigning.

It's interesting how many 49er sailors are to be found at the top of the rigs doing the role of windspotting, for example. Charlie McKee, who won the 49er Worlds with his brother Jonathan in 2001, is one of the tacticians for Luna Rossa (although the Italian team's favoured tactician at the moment seems to be Torben Grael, another well known Olympian), and he reckons some of the skills sailing a 49er are very transferable to these 80-foot, 24-tonne Cup boats.

"Downwind in a Cup boat you're sailing quite big angles, like you do in a 49er," says McKee, who has won Olympic bronzes crewing in both 470s and 49ers. "The other thing is that both a Cup boat and a 49er travel pretty much at wind speed downwind, so you learn to look in the right place for the breeze."

Whereas most sailors are used to looking straight back upwind for the breeze, 49er sailors get used to looking for breeze that might be off to the side or sometimes even in front of the boat, such is the skiff's ability to match or sail faster than windspeed. "It's a difficult thing for some sailors to grasp," says McKee, "but 49er sailors already have that instinct, which is probably why you see so many of them up the rigs of these Cup boats. At one time it seemed like we had the whole of the 49er fleet up there!"

Emirates Team New Zealand had not looked as sharp in the early Round Robins of the Louis Vuitton Cup as people had expected. One of the reasons suggested was the injury to the team's strategist Adam Beashel (who finished 2nd in the 49er Worlds in 1999), whose finger was badly mashed in a winch during Louis Vuitton Act 13. Fortunately surgery later that night meant that Beashel's finger could be saved, although he had yet to recover to the point where he was fit enough to go racing again.

In Beashel's place, American Laser sailor and recent Star convert Mark Mendelblatt stepped into the windspotter's role, and after an uncertain start he has grown increasingly comfortable in that crucial job. But it must be harder for a sailor used to running deep downwind - such as you do on a Laser or Star - to get a sense of where to search for the breeze in a boat that relies on apparent wind as much as a Cup boat.

The idea of travelling at the same speed as the wind is pretty hard to get your head around, let alone what it must be like in an International Moth where you're sometimes travelling at more than twice windspeed. Talking to Simon Payne, our reigning Moth World Champion, he said his best multiple of true windspeed to date has been in 7 knots' wind when he has achieved 16 knots of boatspeed. At this point, not only are you catching up the gusts in front of you, but you are sailing through them and out the other side!

There were a number of British sailors dotted throughout the America's Cup teams in Valencia, most of them now departed after the end of the Round Robin series. But Ben Ainslie is still there, watching his crew mates racing on Emirates Team New Zealand each day from one of the chase boats. It must be immensely frustrating for a sailor of his talents to be spectating from the sidelines, but that is what he signed up for, and in the background Ben is believed to have become a great Cup helmsman in his designated role of ‘B boat' driver for the Kiwis. Ben acquitted himself pretty well in the fleet racing of Louis Vuitton Act 13 in April, but where match racing is concerned, Dean Barker is still the leading man.

It amazes me how slow the Cup world has been to latch on to Ben's superhuman talents. He didn't have a happy time at OneWorld, the American syndicate that competed in the 2003 Cup in Auckland, and Ben left that campaign early to go and focus on his Finn career. This time at least he has had a leading role - albeit still away from the limelight - with the Kiwis. Surely next time, however, a team will have the sense and foresight to put him in as the helmsman designate, the top man for the job. There's no doubt that if Ben was a New Zealander he would have progressed a lot further in his Cup career by now.

Ben's great friend Iain Percy has had a much more public role in this America's Cup as the skipper of the ill-fated campaign from Sicily, the +39 Challenge. Through all the financial and organisational mismanagement of this campaign over the past two years, it's amazing that the sailing team didn't down tools and walk away a long time ago. While others around Port America's Cup were earning six-figure salaries, Percy and his crew were working for months without pay, as their Italian masters argued and quibbled away in the background.

It's a testament to Percy's leadership skills that the sailing crew stayed together at all, but much of that stems from their camaraderie built up from racing Finns and Stars together. Unfortunately the mismanagement of the team meant they entered the Louis Vuitton Cup woefully underpractised, so we never got to see the best of Percy, Ian Walker and Co. But the upside at least is that Percy is now released from his duties with +39 Challenge to go and chase down an Olympic medal in the Star. Ben Ainslie, on the other hand, must sit around Valencia a while longer, much as he'd like to be training in the Finn for Cascais.

After going separate ways with former crew Steve Mitchell, who's doing a lot of coaching for Shirley Robertson's Yngling campaign, Percy is teamed up with Andew ‘Bart' Simpson, his old Finn buddy and the windspotter on board +39. While most teams opt for a lighter-weight windspotter from a 49er background, Bart is one of the heavier boys sent aloft, although Percy says there is no causal connection between Bart's weight and the +39 rig which tumbled down during Act 13.

Talking of dropped rigs (although in all seriousness +39's rig was wrenched out of the boat after an unfortunate rig clash with the German team who steamed in on port tack), Bart has already dropped his first Star rig during one of the new pairing's early outings in Miami earlier this year. It seems like this is a ritual that every sailor has to go through before he can truly call himself a ‘Star crew'.

The spindly Star mast is very vulnerable during a gybe, when the crew's task is to release one set of runners and pull the new set on so that the mast is supported throughout the manoeuvre. Not that I've ever had the honour of doing the runners on a Star - and nor would I ever want to - but it seems like one of those jobs that you can only ever get wrong. If you get the job right, no one is ever going to say, "That's a great job he's done there, this team has just won the Olympic Gold because the crew worked those runners to perfection!" No, the only time anyone is ever going to pay attention to the importance of the runners is when you get it wrong! It's like being a goalkeeper, but worse. It's just one aspect of a job which must surely make Star crewing the most thankless role in Olympic sailing - with the possible exception of drop-hiking an Yngling.

Still, Bart was sounding only too excited about putting the +39 debacle behind him and high-tailing out of Valencia for sunny Hayling Island. "We've got a new boat, we've got to fit it out, and start sailing from Hayling. Then we put one boat on the way to China, get ready for the Holland Regatta and then three weeks training in Cascais." Just listening to the team's schedule left me out of breath, but time is short in the build-up to the World Championships in Cascais, near Lisbon.

"So, what's the goal for Cascais?" I asked Bart. "To win." Short answer! "Is that realistic," I follow. "Yeah," says Bart. Well, short and to the point! I suppose we shouldn't question this team's potential. After all, Percy won the Star Worlds at his first attempt, not long after he and Stevie Mitchell had got their campaign on the road in 2002. That was a windy regatta and Percy has always excelled in the breeze in the Star. The hope for Cascais is that it too will be a windy regatta.

Intrigued by Bart's optimism, I asked Percy if winning was also on his agenda. "You go there to try and win like you do with every regatta. But we really need to buckle down. We need a lot of time on the water to get the legs ready." The ability to really hike the Star has become a prerequisite for helms and crews these days, as ex-Finn sailors like Percy and Xavier Rohart and Freddie Loof have come into the class over the past few years. More recent converts to the keelboat are ex-Laser champions like Mark Mendelblatt (mentioned earlier), Hamish Pepper (who like Percy won the Star Worlds at his first attempt in last year's Worlds) and the undisputed daddy of Laser sailing, Robert Scheidt who finished runner-up to Pepper last year.

"It's a really tough Olympic class now," Percy acknowledges, and he feels that helming a Cup boat for the past couple of years has probably made him a bit soft, not that I'd ever suggest that to him. No doubt Percy and Simpson will put the time in the gym and get fully up to pace for the muscle conditions. Where Percy has struggled is sailing the Star in the light winds, where it's more about the mind than the muscle. After the disappointment of the Olympics in Athens three years ago, I recall Percy paying tribute to Torben Grael's ability to see the unseeable, to sniff out breeze that no one else seemed aware of.

If that was a crucial ingredient to the Brazilian's gold medal performance in Athens, it's going to even more important in the predicted driftathon in China next year. And it's one of the reasons why Percy was keen to bring Bart into the programme, for his sixth sense for windspotting. "In somewhere like Cascais I don't think there will be much difference," says Percy. "Bart's about to discover that crewing a Star in breeze is all about swallowing a lot of water. But there are a few key moments in a Star race where a crew can give a lot of tactical input and he'll be good at that.

"It's a real strength of his to see where the best pressure is. I think in the light winds of China that's going to be important. Spotting the right shift, picking the best breeze, Bart's got that in spades." However, when it comes to Qingdao, there is one limiting factor that might cause problems even for a man of Bart's talents. "Normally you can't see more than a hundred yards in the fog," Percy admits, "but in most venues it should be quite an asset."