Following your dream and helping to inspire people are core to our philosophy here at Lifetime.

So imagine our excitement last week as we watched Sir Ben Ainslie help inspire Oracle Team USA to one of the greatest comebacks in sporting history.

His sporting success story encapsulates everything we stand for.

The four-time Olympic champion helped his team recover from an 8-1 deficit to record a remarkable 9-8 success over Emirates Team New Zealand in the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco Bay.

The 36-year-old told BBC Radio 5 Live: “We never stopped believing we could improve and get back into the competition.

“It got harder and harder for us, but ultimately we hung on in there and won that deciding race, so the team did an incredible job.

“We just grew and grew and in the end we were too strong for the Kiwis.

“I grew up down in Falmouth in Cornwall. We had an America’s Cup team down there in 1987 and I remember as a kid watching them training and preparing and thinking about maybe one day being involved with the America’s Cup.

“To be part of a winning America’s Cup team is for me personally part of a lifelong dream.”

Ainslie also paid tribute to his friend Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson, who died in the same San Francisco harbour in May.

The two men grew up and learned their sailing together and it was Simpson who crept into Ainslie’s thoughts as he celebrated a stunning moment in his sensational career..

Ainslie said: ‘I looked up to the stars after it all settled down at the end and thought of Bart. In some ways this was for him. He loved sailing and he loved the America’s Cup. He would have been so excited about this series.”

Team USA faced an uphill task from the start after being docked two penalty points, meaning they were 8-1 down last week despite having won three races.

Ainslie was drafted in as tactician, in place of John Kostecki, from the warm-up crew as his team looked to get back in the contest and was one of the catalysts of the turnaround which stunned the Kiwis.

“It was a pretty big shift,” the Briton said on BBC One. “It was a big call for the management to make, but I gelled really well with Jimmy Spithill, the skipper of the team, we got stuck into the challenge and we turned things around.

“It’s quite unbelievable to think where we were 10 days ago, to come back from that.”

New Zealand prime minister John Key summed up the mood of his country in defeat by simply tweeting: “Bugger.”

As our very own Simon Durkan stated last week: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”