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Despite the focus on Flyer and Ceramco, the overall leader of the race by the start of the final leg to Portsmouth was, in fact the French boat Charles Heidseck, or Champage Charlie as she was known in the fleet, skippered by Alain Gabbay.

Van Rietschoten needed to cross the Solent finish line a whopping 92 hours ahead of Charlie, which looked unlikely unless the French boat came a cropper during the 5,970 nm passage. But the Dutchman was a tough competitor – his list of boat rules included a strict ban on complaints over the food – and soon he was employing tactics to unsettle his opponents.

It became harder to find out where the boats were, since he refused to reveal his position in case it conceded any advantage, a tactic duly adopted by other skippers. It was only a week before the end of the leg that the situation became clear. Flyer was 260 nm from the Azores and Charlie was 300 nm astern, three hours ahead on handicap.

Of the original 29 starters, only 24 were still in contention during the final leg and there were to be more casualties as the curtain came down on the third event. Les Williams in FCF Challenger lost a mast – the tenth dismasting of the race – and Claudio Stampi’s boffins on La Barca Laboratoire were forced to pump like billy-o after the keel bolts started to fall out.

It was at the Azores that the winners and losers were determined and as ever, it was the weather that had a lot to do with it, in the form of a High and a few lows. The two leading boats, Flyer and Ceramco, made it through before the light airs struck and powered off in the direction of the Needles, Flyer arriving without putting in a single tack. But Charlie and the other French boat Kriter IX had the brakes applied and without much else to do, the crews offloaded any remaining fresh water and all the beer and wine plus any surplus food, in order to lighten the load and increase the speed.

It was to no avail and when Champagne Charlie eventually arrived at the finish line, the crew on Flyer had been there already for almost five days, despite a last minute crisis which almost found them parked up after grounding briefly on Shingles Bank. The margin gave the legendary Dutchman a 19 hour advantage and thereby victory in the race for the second consecutive time. More significantly for Van Rietschoten, a fourth line honours win in four legs meant he had fulfilled his aim of being the fastest boat around the course, not just in 1981 but of all time, having carved an almighty 14 days off the race record.

Blake’s Ceramco notched up a second win on handicap, to bring a momentous race to a close, confirming the widely held view that while immensely skilled both as a seaman and yachtsman, the Kiwi giant was desperately unlucky. The dismasting, shortly into the first leg, had effectively ruled him out of title contention, but the way he kept his crew motivated to complete the circuit at breakneck speed was an inspiration for a whole new generation of Whitbread race skippers.

“For me, the most memorable thing about that race was the sheer scale of the disasters, but although the crews were mostly dedicated amateur sailors, and good ones too, some were pretty bloody useless,” said the Rear Admiral Williams who went onto head up the organisation in 1985, working, as the organisers did in those days, on an entirely voluntary basis.