A World Youth Championship winner in the Mistral class of windsurfing in 1998, Nick Dempsey improved his result at every World Championship between 1998 and 2004 climbing from 26th to 5th over the seven championships. At the Athens Olympic he was a rather distant fourth coming into the last race of the series but won race eleven and, when other results went in his favour, claimed a bronze medal. This was the first Olympic medal won by a British windsurfer. Having won another bronze at the 2007 World Championship he was considered one of the favourites for the Beijing Games and was a contender for gold entering the final race. This time he could repeat the exploits of Athens and was placed fourth after a poor end to the competition. He rebounded by winning the world title in 2009 and was a silver medalist at the Olympic test event off the coast of Weymouth in 2011, and in 2013 he became the first man to win two World RS:X Windsurfing titles.
Dempsey won a silver medal at the 2012 London Olympics when he recovered from a slow start to finish well behind the Dutch gold medalist Dorian van Rijsselberge. Whilst the result was the same in Rio four years later, it was Dempsey who raced away in the early stages winning three of the first four races but van Rijsselberge then dominated and won six of the final eight races to, again, capture the gold medal. Shortly after the Beijing Olympics, Dempsey married Olympian champion yachtswoman Sarah Ayton, although they later divorced. Dempsey subsequently dated Hannah Mills who replaced Ayton on the Great Britain team when she forfeited her place on the team to support her husband’s Qolympic quest.
Great Britain