London 2012: Team GB windsurfers ready to take last chance of medals

You can easily spot the windsurfers as they mill around the slipway at regattas. While the sailors favour smart polo shirts and sensible tracksuits, the windsurfers are much more likely to be sporting baggy shorts and eccentric hats. They tend to be a laid-back breed apart. But it would be difficult to find two more driven and tough-talking sportspeople than team GB's windsurfers, Nick Dempsey and Bryony Shaw. Both are experienced, doughty competitors who feel they have a lot to prove going into London 2012. The fact that their sport is, as it stands, being ditched as an Olympic discipline after the regatta in Weymouth and Portland is steeling their resolve to make the podium. Shaw compares the decision to replace windsurfing with kitesurfing for the Rio games in 2016 to losing a family member or a dear friend. "It's like a bereavement," says Shaw, Britain's most successful female Olympic windsurfer. "It seems a hasty decision and it's devastating for the all the younger windsurfers who have been training for Rio and beyond. But it does heighten the focus." The decision does seem to have been made rapidly. An evaluation group was set up by ISAF, world sailing's governing body, in November last year to examine the case for promoting kiteboarding. The group recommended that the sport be included in the ISAF World Cup and World Championships. But in May, the ISAF council went a step further and voted that kitesurfing should be included in the Olympics , replacing windsurfing. Shaw said the campaign against the decision was gathering force and she still hopes it might be reversed at ISAF's annual conference in the winter. If not, it may be that Shaw will convert to kiteboarding – many of the skills are transferable – but this looks like being her last chance of a windsurfing gold. Shaw, 29, learned to windsurf aged nine while on holiday in France, before honing her skills on holidays in west Wales and on Farmoor reservoir near her family home in Oxfordshire. She deferred her place at university, where she was to study architecture, to campaign for the Beijing Olympics, and was rewarded with a bronze medal. Her preparation for this Olympics has been made more difficult by two energy-sapping chest infections. But, under careful medical supervision, she has continued to put the hours in off the Dorset coast and is confident she will be ready come the start of the regatta. Nick Dempsey appears, if anything, even more angry at the ISAF decision. "It's just stupid," is his blunt assessment. Dempsey argues that windsurfing is the sailing event closest to the Olympic ideal – hugely physical and accessible to more people than most of the other nine classes. Now almost 32, the Norwich-born athlete made his Olympic debut at Sydney in 2000 as a 20-year-old. Everything about the experience was thrilling. "I remember how excited I was that the drinks were free in the venue and every day I'd fill up my rucksack with drinks and take them back and stock up our fridge, and it was brilliant. It was really good times." He and his friends "snuck" Sarah Ayton, who later won gold medals at Athens and Beijing in the Yngling class but was not competing at Sydney, into their digs. Dempsey and Ayton went on to marry and have two children. "She stayed in our Olympic accommodation for the whole games, I don't know how we got away with it – it would never happen nowadays." Dempsey finished 16th in Sydney. Four years later in Athens he became the first Briton to take a windsurfing medal when he won a bronze. He believed he could take gold at Beijing but finished, shatteringly, in fourth. "It was a horrible place to be." Dempsey admits that seeing fellow members of the team, including Ayton, celebrating their successes made his disappointment all the harder to bear. "The day Sarah won her gold medal I had a particularly bad day and I almost couldn't look her in the eye because I was so involved in my own race. I really struggled to celebrate with her and I was pretty broken. It was the same afterwards. I kind of struggled to share her success and it was a shame because, you know, your wife has just won her second Olympic gold medal and although you're happy, you really struggle inside." Ayton had planned to go for her third Olympic gold in another class of boat at London 2012 but put her medal ambitions on hold to look after the children and allow Dempsey to try to win the top prize. "I'm very, very lucky to have Sarah. She's an amazing mother and without her I wouldn't be able to do my Olympic campaign. She has basically given me a pass for four months to go and do my thing and try and win an Olympic medal and come back and be a father afterwards." Dempsey refuses to say what the future holds for him but the whisper is that he might aim to compete at Rio 2016 with Ayton in the new mixed catamaran class. It is a fascinating thought but one that Dempsey will put to the back of his mind when the competition starts at Weymouth.