By CHARLES McGRATH | Photo: Clive Mason/Getty Images

He also put together a team consisting of a strength coach, a trainer, a massage therapist and three sailing coaches

QINGDAO, China — The oldest United States athlete at these Games is John Dane III, a 58-year-old sailor from Gulfport, Miss. He is a tall, big-chested man who claims to be in better shape now than he was 30 years ago. But his hair is gray, his biceps do not ripple, and at the end of a race his shoulders sometimes slump a little. He is frequently mistaken for a coach at the sailing center on the Yellow Sea.

At a pre-Olympics dinner in Beijing, former President George H.W. Bush introduced Dane to the American ambassador, who asked him about his position on the United States team. When Dane said he was one of the competitors, the ambassador laughed and said, “But what do you really do?”

Dane had been trying for an Olympic slot since 1968, and sailed unsuccessfully in the trials six times — in the Dragon, Soling and Finn classes. His current ride is a Star, and while preparing for the Olympic trials in the Star class for these Games last fall off Southern California, he left nothing to chance. He rented a house in Los Angeles, shipped in four boats and hired weather forecasters. He also put together a team consisting of a strength coach, a trainer, a massage therapist and three sailing coaches, including Marc Pickel, a German boat builder who finished fifth in the Star world championship in April. Dane, the skipper, and his crewman, Austin Sperry, his 30-year-old son-in-law, won the trials by a whisker.

In the Olympics, he is competing against Pickel, using a boat that Pickel designed.

Dane will not reveal how much he has spent, but it clearly does not hurt that he has a decent day job. He is the president and chief executive of Trinity Yachts, one of the world’s largest builders of megayachts, the types with saunas, flat-screen TVs and helipads. The firm had been based in New Orleans, but was submerged by Hurricane Katrina.

Refusing to shut down, Dane moved the yard and its employees, for whom he bought prefabricated houses, to Gulfport. The operation is now split between Gulfport and his former yard in New Orleans.

Star boats are not megayachts. They are 22 feet long, have two-person crews and are among the oldest — some would say slowest — and most classic of the Olympic designs. They have been part of the Games since 1932, and some of the most celebrated names in sailing have done time in Stars. It is a traditional keelboat with running backstays, and it requires less athleticism than some of the other classes.

But the Star is not an old man’s boat. To keep one down in a wind of any strength is work. The crewman needs to be a bit of a gorilla; he hikes out on a trapeze with his seat on the side of the hull, his back over the water, and only his feet inside the boat. One of the crew at Qingdao is so big and so heavily tattooed that he looks like Queequeg.

“There are so many sailors at a high level in the Star, and the way we sail these boats now is for the athletes, for the young,” said Robert Scheidt, 35, the skipper of the Star team from Brazil. He was the 2007 Star world champion.

Dane’s gorilla is Sperry, who is 6 feet 1 inch, 225 pounds and began crewing on Star boats when he was 14. In 2004, he was a training partner for Paul Cayard, who finished fifth at the Athens Olympics. Dane and Sperry met in 1999 at a regatta in Pass Christian, Miss., and did not hit it off. Dane demanded to know if Sperry was dating his daughter. Sperry lied and said, “No, sir.”

“Well, that’s good,” Dane said. “Because I’ve got a shovel and a shotgun.”

Sperry and Sally Dane became engaged in 2005, and as a lark, and a way to get to know each other better, John Dane and Sperry sailed together at the Star Western Hemisphere Championships in the Bahamas in 2005. They did surprisingly well, finishing second to Sperry’s old mentor Cayard. Then, deciding to test the partnership further, they entered the 2006 Bacardi Cup and won.

Theirs is a complicated relationship, and Dane and Sperry have been known to stay in separate hotels at a regatta. Dane is used to being the boss, and on the boat he calls the shots. Sperry, who has Olympic aspirations of his own, is not only Dane’s son-in-law but also, in effect, his employee; he works for United States Marine, of which Dane is the majority owner. And yet Dane could never have made the Olympics without him.

In his younger days, Dane was volatile and quick tempered, and often compared to Ted Turner on the sailing circuit. Now he is courtly and self-possessed — in his offshore moments anyway — the model of a well-to-do Southern gent. He has an old-school Mississippi accent and calls the right side of the boat “stuhbuhd.”

“People look at the skipper and crew as a marriage,” Dane told The Mississippi Sun Herald in 2007. “You are in close quarters and things get tense. I would say in two years we’ve had only two or three interesting moments. It’s just the heat of the competition.”

Sperry, on the other hand, makes no secret that he sometimes finds the relationship trying. “It’s been a long three years for both of us,” he said of their Olympic quest as he hosed down the boat after their first race in Qingdao. “We’re just hoping to go out on a high note.”

He added: “For sure, it’s tough. If it doesn’t go well, I still have to go home and be a son-in-law and a husband.”

Asked why his father-in-law had changed his mind about him, he said quickly, “Maybe I can sail,” then, “You know, I’m pretty successful in my own right.”

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