Page and Belcher were well clear in the standings heading into the last race and needed only to beat one team in the 10-boat fleet to secure the title.

British pair Luke Patience and Stuart Bithell finished first in the medal race to secure the silver medal overall.

Marit Bouwmeester of Netherlands won the women's Laser Radial gold medal, overtaking Belgium's Evi van Acker in the last 100 meters to claim her first world title. Van Acker was in a good position to earn the points to win the title until she was ordered to do a penalty turn close to the finish line.

"I could have won. Some mistakes were made, that's what cost me the gold medal," van Acker said.

American sailor Paige Railey won the bronze medal by a single point.

Israeli windsurfer Lee Korzits won the women's RS:X title, edging Poland's Zofia Noceti-Klepacka and Marina Alabau of Spain.

The first medals of the Dec. 3-18 championships were awarded Sunday, with three-time Olympic gold medalist Ben Ainslie of Britain controversially ruled out of contention in the Finn class after he was found guilty by a championship jury of gross misconduct for grappling with a cameraman on a media boat late Saturday.

Ainslie described the two-race disqualification as a "massive overreaction." The sanction meant he couldn't win a medal in the Finn, or heavy dinghy class, which he was leading by eight points ahead of Sunday's medal decider.

In his absence, British teammate Giles Scott won the Finn world championship by a point from Pieter-Jan Postma of Netherlands.

Postma won the last race, but Scott earned enough with his second-place finish to claim the title.

"I came here looking to win," Scott said. "I felt like I needed to prove myself. I made things difficult for myself at the start but I managed to seek out some decent waves and it was an emotional finish, I nearly ended up in tears." After finishing second in the ninth race, Ainslie jumped from his dinghy and confronted the cameraman aboard the boat after being angered by the vessel getting too close to the race and creating a wash which he felt helped one of his rivals.

He argued with the skipper of the boat, grabbed the cameraman, then dived back into the water and swam back to his dinghy.

"I got on the boat and I said to the guys 'you've got no respect,'" Ainslie said Sunday. "I was very angry with the situation." He said he was disappointed at missing a chance at a sixth world title.

"It's a massive overreaction to what was an incident," said Ainslie, who was unhappy with how media boats have been deployed during the championships off the Western Australia coast. "Unfortunately it's part and parcel of the sport trying to develop its area within TV and on a number of instances this week that line has been crossed.

"Certainly I over-reacted to what I thought was a situation where my performance was being severely hindered." Ainslie won silver at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and gold at the 2000 Sydney Games in the Laser class. He moved up to the larger Finn class, in which he won gold at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics.