Ben Ainslie may have been left unshaken by the haka performed in Friday’s official eve-of-regatta press conference. But Peter Burling and his New Zealand crew would be well-advised not to get the British helmsman’s dander up in this America’s Cup match.

Jonas Hogh-Christensen knows only too well what happens when Ainslie gets angry. “Everything changed that day,” admits the Dane, ruefully, 12 years on from Ainslie going ‘Hulk-mode’ at the 2012 Olympics.

It is remembered now as one of the most iconic moments in Olympic sailing history. And of those Games. The day a furious Ainslie came off the water and accused rivals Hogh-Christensen – the ‘Great Dane’, replete with big red beard – and Dutchman Pieter-Jan Postma, of “ganging up” on him by calling him for a penalty he did not deserve. “They’ve made a big mistake,” the then three-time Olympic champion growled at reporters in the mixed zone. “They’ve made me angry and you don’t want to make me angry.”

‘It took me years to get over... I was annoyed and sad’

The rest is history. Ainslie, who had failed to beat Hogh-Christensen in the first six races of that Finn series, went on to win his fourth successive Olympic gold, surpassing Paul Elvstrom as most successful Olympic sailor of all time. Hogh-Christensen returned to Denmark with a silver medal and a minor case of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“It took me a few years to get over to be honest,” Hogh-Christensen admits cheerily over breakfast in Barcelona last week. “I don’t think I was actually depressed. I was just annoyed and frustrated and sad. But you have to give Ben credit. He’s by far the most competitive guy I’ve ever met.”

Now working for SailGP, the world series, as its global franchise and commercial director, Hogh-Christensen actually has an extraordinary story to tell about that week.

Of course, everything in the immediate aftermath was all about Ainslie. His star was firmly in the ascendancy. By the end of that year the Ineos skipper had been knighted. By the end of the following year Ainslie had won the America’s Cup with Oracle Team USA and began setting up his own team, the fruits of which we are now seeing in Barcelona.

Hogh-Christensen, who had played his part in one of the great Olympic rivalries, was largely forgotten about. But his version of that week is wild.

According to him, it was not so much Ainslie getting angry which affected him, it was the public’s response.

‘If he called me the c-word, I’d call him it back’

“I mean that whole thing that happened during the Games, it wasn’t a surprise to me right?” he says. “I’d seen that 100 times. Ben and I had gone head to head at many regattas. And like I said, he’s a very fierce competitor. He will do literally everything to win. And he loses his s--- every once in a while, especially in those years.

“I used to push back. If he called me the c-word, I’d call him the c-word back, you know?

“So it wasn’t out of the ordinary what happened that day, at least the way I saw it. But that’s not how the world saw it. Everything changed that day.”

What happened was pretty disturbing – and in all honesty does not reflect all that brilliantly on British fans. “I started getting hundreds of prank calls,” Hogh-Christensen reveals. “I don’t know how they got my number but I had to turn my mobile off because it was just, like, people ringing and calling me all kinds of things.

“If it was a UK number I was like ‘OK, block’. I was getting all kinds of nasty texts, nasty voice messages, calls.”

That was just the start. It gets worse. “I think the next day was a lay day,” Hogh-Christensen continues. “My then girlfriend, now wife, had come over for the week, and we decided to go to the movies in Weymouth.

“I can’t remember what we watched. I think I slept through whatever it was. But we just needed to chill out. And then I think we went for lunch. Anyway when we came back out to the car, somebody had jumped on the hood. There was a big dent in it. And not only that but somebody had taken a s--- on the hood and p----d up and down the side of the car.

“This was in the middle of the day, parked downtown, on the [sea]front.”

Hogh-Christensen laughs good-naturedly. But it cannot have been fun at the time. How did they know it was his car? “It was sponsored,” he says. “An Audi A4. It had Danish plates and my name and flag stencilled on the side.”

‘My girlfriend was shocked but there was no real harm done’

Did he report it to the police? “No. I was so focused on the racing. I didn’t care about reporting it to the cops. My mind was completely somewhere else. I mean, my girlfriend was a little shocked but there was no real harm done.

“We opened the hood and popped it back up. And we took it to a local car wash. I’m sure it was some 18-year-old kid who thought he was funny for a minute. It was probably a dare between friends or something.”

To his credit Hogh-Christensen does not blame his defeat that week on his treatment by Weymouth’s ‘fans’, or even on Ainslie getting angry.

“I look back on two or three incidents earlier in the week when I should have done better,” he says. “That’s what I really regret. One race where I pushed too hard at the start, and had to do [penalty] circles. Another where Ben called me for being OCS [over the line early], when I wasn’t, and I went back and then lost concentration and capsized after catching back up. Those are the incidents I look back on with regret.”

As for the medal race, Hogh-Christensen says he has “never watched it back”. It is too painful. Ainslie was in fact incredibly close to losing out on gold. Sailing Hogh-Christensen down the fleet, the pair of them nearly lost out to Postma, who was still mathematically in contention. The Dutchman hit the camera on the New Zealand boat and took a penalty lap, dropping him to fourth place.

“He didn’t have to, because the camera was not part of the boat,” Hogh-Christensen says. “He would have won the Games. I think it destroyed PJ as a human being.”

As for Hogh-Christensen, he bears no ill will towards Ainslie. He says they “can have a beer together” now, although he adds they “don’t discuss that”. While it took him a long time to get over it, he is aware that he played his part in one of the most thrilling Olympic regattas in history. And his respect for Ainslie is clear.

“If Ben had not got angry about that, he would have found something else to get angry about,” he reasons. “I’ve never met an athlete as competitive as him. He wants to win so bad. He cares so much. Honestly, for me as an athlete, there’s no doubt that Ben is a once-in-a-century type.

“He is, in many ways, the equivalent of a [Lewis] Hamilton or a [Michael] Schumacher, or a [Michael] Jordan, or a Tiger Woods, or whoever you want to compare him to. He is one of the all-time greats, not only of sailing, but sports in general. And I was at a point in my life where I knew that if I was at my very best I could beat him. That makes me proud.”

Hogh-Christensen, whose father is the former Olympic sailor Jens Christensen and a co-founder of the world’s leading sailmakers North Sails, admits he will be watching this week wondering what might have been. Although he won two world championships in his career, 2012 was the one that got away. He came back and qualified for Rio, his fourth Olympic campaign, but fell ill and finished towards the back of the fleet.

‘I don’t think Ben is a natural team player’

He then helped to set up the Danish SailGP challenger before segueing into the commercial side of the business. “It could potentially have changed my sailing trajectory,” he says, smiling. “Maybe I would have been one of the guys racing these [America’s Cup] boats, right? Sliding doors. But I don’t blame Ben. As I say, he’s the ultimate competitor and I took him on at his best.

“I honestly think what he has done with his team – setting it up, the partnership with Mercedes, driving the boat – is extraordinary. If he wins this thing now it would be another extraordinary chapter. I don’t even think he’s a natural team player!

“But again, it’s one of those things where he’s like ‘I need to learn to be a team player, to get this thing I want’. He’ll just grind and grind until he gets it right. You see it with certain people, as I mentioned, the Schumachers, the Jordans, that sort of intensity where they’re like ‘If I have to drive the other guy off the race course, or half-kill myself, I’ll do it if it means a chance to win.’”

Burling has been warned.