We just came 5th or 6th and won a gold medal?

In sailing you get points based on where you finish, 1 for first, 2 for second and so on. After 10 races you add up your points, take off the points for your worst finish and then the top 10 boats go through to the medal race where points are doubled, so 2 for first, 4 for second on so on.

The person or crew with the lowest points wins. So, if you go into the race 15 points ahead of 2nd place you can finish up 7 places behind them and still win. This leads to some wonderfully mean tactics. Things like deliberately forcing an opponent over the start line before the race begins so they get disqualified and just constantly sailing in front of them stealing their wind so you finish ahead of them.

It's a cumulative event, with scores for each race during the various stages.

Track racing does have an equivalent activity. The most similar to the sailing would be pentathlon or heptathlon, whereby your score is a cumulative score across a number of events over a number of days. Therefore, it's entirely possible to have such a commanding lead coming into the final event that you no longer need to cross the line first to pick up the gold medal on offer. The same goes for the sailing - building a lead early on, will mean you're not forced into winning the final round in order to medal.

We actually came 9th, but all he had to do was cover the man from Cyprus.