What is it about beginner's luck? We've all experienced it at some point in our lives, and hopefully you've experienced it some time in your sailing career. However, there's nothing quite like winning a Star World Championship at your first attempt, just as Kiwi team Hamish Pepper and Carl Williams have just achieved at the recent Worlds in San Francisco. To be fair, there's probably no such thing as beginner's luck at Olympic level, especially not in a fleet as competitive as the Star. But surely even Pepper and Williams must have surprised themselves at such a stellar performance. The helmsman, Pepper, only stepped in a Star 10 months ago while Carl Williams had just 35 days in the keelboat before the Worlds began.

However, these guys are no rookies in the wider world of sailing. Pepper was a top Laser sailor for more than a decade, finishing in the top 10 of the World Championships on numerous occasions. He has also been the winning tactician in the Farr 40 and Mumm 30 World Championships, and Pepper puts his success in the Star down to a combination of his experience in both the Laser and the keelboat classes.

He has not been so lucky in the America's Cup, however. He was tactician aboard Team New Zealand's ill-fated NZL-82 when in 2003 the Defenders fell 5-0 to Alinghi in the most humiliating of circumstances. And then earlier this year he suffered a difference of opinions with the owner of Mascalzone Latino team, resulting in him leaving the team and with the rules of the Cup meaning that he now cannot work for any other team this side of the America's Cup Finals in Valencia next June. Williams on the other hand holds down a job working the pit for BMW Oracle Racing.

At least Pepper's enforced absence from Valencia will give him more time to focus on the Olympics and getting to learn the Star a bit more. Although that brings us back to the topic of beginner's luck. How long does it last, and why can't it last forever? There's something about stepping into an unfamiliar boat and just getting on and sailing it, before you have time to think too hard about it. Nike's brand motto, ‘Just Do It', springs to mind. Of course, it doesn't always work out quite so swimmingly, indeed in the case of some dinghies without the stabilising benefit of a keel, it can work out a little too swimmingly! But some sailors really do have the knack of getting into strange boats and working out what makes them tick in a frighteningly short time.

But then - for most of us - the honeymoon period can end as abruptly as it began. You've written down those fast settings, you've changed those fittings that weren't quite cleating at the right angle, you've replaced those jib sheets that weren't quite long enough. And then you go racing again, ready to show the world what you can really do when you're organised. And then your results head south! What's all that about? Sometimes it seems it just doesn't pay to try too hard, although in the longer term there is little substitute for hard work and application.

So now begins the hard phase, when it's nose to the grindstone and working out what this boat is really all about. You shouldn't have noted down those fast rig settings, but now you've started, you've got to keep on going until the notebook is full up. Now you start trying all sorts of rig settings, testing different sails, actually thinking about how you tack the boat, and gradually - if you're lucky or more likely just very persistent - you should find yourself climbing back up the pecking order.

Ah... ‘pecking order'. That other dreaded phrase, two words that probably don't even register with Ben Ainslie but which most of us have experienced at some point. I'm sure this is a big part of why beginner's luck exists, that you're not filled with preconceptions about who the hotshots are, who's got the fastest boat, who knows the venue like the back of their hand. One of the joys of being a rookie is not knowing stuff that really shouldn't affect you anyway. When you're starting out in a class, you look around you up the first beat and all you see are boats. They all look the same, because you don't know any better. But then as you get to know the class and the people that you're sailing against, those other boats take on a new meaning, and new thoughts creep into your head. "That's the National Champion over there, better not tack next to him. There's Two-Tack Tony, maybe he knows where he's going."

Of course, if you're at the top of the ‘pecking order', then that's fine. It's working to your advantage. If people give you a bit of space on the start line because they don't want to be rolled by you 30 seconds later, then all well and good. But getting to that envious position is the tough bit, and that's where the hard graft comes in, chipping away at the weaknesses in your campaign until you can turn them into strengths.

So it will be interesting to see if the new Star World Champions can maintain that level of performance all the way through to the Olympics in Qingdao. Almost as impressive was Robert Scheidt and Bruno Prada finishing runner-up to the Kiwis. The Brazilians are not quite as new to the class, as they came 6th at their first attempt last year. But in a way Scheidt's transition is more impressive because he really has done little other than Laser sailing in his career. He doesn't have a background in technical classes nor the benefit of Pepper's broad experience in keelboats, although of course what he does have is two Olympic Golds, one Silver and seven Laser world titles to his name. So there wasn't much doubting him making an impact in the Star class, where his legendary downwind sailing ability is a powerful weapon to bring into play.

It was downwind speed that contributed to Iain Percy and Steve Mitchell's victory in the Star Worlds at their first attempt back in 2002, and you may have been wondering why I haven't mentioned them already. Well, I'm sure they wouldn't argue if I said they had a shocker in San Francisco, picking up an OCS on one day, getting dumped the wrong side of major shifts on other days, and generally seeming out of sorts as they sailed to a disappointing 24th overall. It was the first time they've not made the podium of the World Championships since they began in the class. A few flashes of brilliance, including a final-race 2nd place, suggest that it is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility that they can scale the rankings again, but Percy and Mitchell will be treating this result as a timely wake-up call.

So Percy/Mitchell and the rest of the fleet were upstaged by two recent converts to the class. What does this tell us? In isolation, not much perhaps, but this year's Star European Championships were dominated by another rookie, the USA's Laser representative in Athens 2004, Mark Mendelblatt, crewed by Mark Strube. And when you look through the Worlds winners back to 2001, when Swedes Fredrik Lööf and Christian Finnsgård won the championship at their first attempt, every event has gone to a helmsmen with recent experience at the top of the Finn class, or in the Laser in the case of Pepper.

This is a statistic that hasn't gone unnoticed with Percy. When I spoke to him in Valencia earlier this year, he was debating whether or not to go to the Finn Gold Cup where on the one hand he might make a fool of himself (he has sailed the boat just a handful of times since winning Gold in Sydney 2000) or on the other hand he might remind himself of the kinetic small-boat skills that brought him such success in the Laser and Finn classes.

I was pleased to see a week later that Percy had taken the brave decision to throw himself back into a class that - Ben Ainslie excluded - demands high levels of practice and training. He knew he wasn't going to win the event, but he did it partly for a fun week of racing and socialising with his mates, and also to rediscover some of the old downwind sailing magic. Percy felt that he had fallen out of touch with the subtleties of body movement and kinetics that are absolutely vital to success in dynamic classes such as the Finn or Laser. In the Star they are not quite so essential, or at least as Percy explained, it's easy to think that they're not quite so essential. If you scoot off down a wave in a planing dinghy it can translate to a significant gain of a few boatlengths over your rivals, whereas in a heavier boat it might be a gain of a few yards, perhaps less than a boatlength. Still, at Olympic level, you take every inch that you can find, and so these skills are ones well worth maintaining.

Percy, by the way, finished 11th in the Gold Cup, so a good deal of the old magic is certainly there. The biggest distraction right now must be his role as skipper of the +39 Challenge for the America's Cup. Despite the team's poor showing in the results at the Louis Vuitton Act regattas these past two years, Percy and his crew have drawn widespread respect for the way they have knuckled down and made the best of an old pig of a boat. Now at least the sailing team has been given a new boat to go and play with next year for the Louis Vuitton Cup, although few expect them to get very far beyond the early stages of the competition. In a way this might be a blessing, as the sooner +39 is out of the Cup, the sooner Percy can get back into full-time training in the Star, in readiness for the ISAF World Championships in Cascais next July and ultimately for the Olympics in China a year later.

Reigning World Champion Hamish Pepper will have his fingers crossed that BMW Oracle Racing doesn't make it through to challenge Alinghi in the America's Cup Final, otherwise he may have to sail his Star singlehanded in Portugal while Carl Williams is engaged in battling the Swiss. There is a clash of dates between the America's Cup and the ISAF World Championships which must have some Cup sailors secretly hoping that they don't make it all the way to end in case they miss their chance to gain selection for the Olympic Games. For some sailors, Olympic Golds still count for more than America's Cups.