Poulsen competed for the Danish sailing squad in the inaugural class at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Building up to his Olympic selection, he scored a commendable, twenty-ninth-place finish to claim one of the 26 berths offered at the 2007 ISAF Worlds in Cascais, Portugal. Poulsen stormed out from a poor start to a blistering top-four finish on the midway of the series. However, he struggled in the breezy conditions on the subsequent races that sent him tumbling down the leaderboard to a lowly twenty-fourth overall with 201 net points.