H2uh0

LAST FEBRUARY, A cheerful 25-year-old Brit named Ellen MacArthur sailed into incandescence aboard her Open 60 Kingfisher with an improbable second-place finish in the Vendée Globe, a 26,000 mile, nonstop, solo circumnavigation that is justifiably considered the world's toughest yacht race. Why improbable? Because it was MacArthur's first Vendée bid, and she had been racing solo for just four years. But mostly because MacArthur, who stands five-foot-two and weighs 130 pounds, is the youngest person ever to have attempted the race, much less finished it. Her time of 94 days, four hours was the second-fastest solo circuit in history, and the fastest ever by a woman. Even race-winner Michel Desjoyeaux, a 35-year-old French sailing star who found himself dueling with MacArthur for the lead two weeks from the finish, was stunned by her performance. "She's a mystery to me," Desjoyeaux said on the dock after the race. "I don't know what I have been doing for the past ten years."

It's a long way from a landlocked home in the hills of Derbyshire to the Vendée Globe. MacArthur got hooked on the life afloat at age four, sailing off England's east coast with her aunt during summer vacations. By 22, she had knocked off two major transatlantic races, the 1997 Mini-Transat and the 1998 Route du Rhum, and was launching her campaign to sail around the world, mastering everything from diesel mechanics to weather forecasting to one-on-one racing tactics. More than anything else, the Vendée is a merciless test of character, and MacArthur unveiled an indomitable spirit. She laboriously hand-sewed a shredded spinnaker, made four exhausting climbs up her 79-foot mast to repair broken gear, destroyed one of her two daggerboards on a submerged object, and within days of the finish was in danger of losing her mast.

The grit and soul of MacArthur's Vendée effort boosted her into the sailing stratosphere. Her Web site survived nearly 500 million hits over the course of the race. Hyperbolic sailing commentators hailed her as the greatest sailor England has ever produced. Slavering European advertisers begged--in vain--for her endorsement of everything from hair spray to vacuum cleaners. (Durex, a condom company, hoped to get her to pose in a rubber dinghy.) Even the queen took note, dubbing MacArthur a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

MacArthur is now invading the elite multihull racing world. On November 4, she and 1993 Vendée Globe winner Alain Gautier will double-hand a 60-foot trimaran from France to Brazil in the high-speed Transat Jacques Vabre. For next year MacArthur is considering another solo lap of the planet, in the 2002 Around Alone race (which, unlike the Vendée, has stops). Outside managed to catch the peripatetic sailing prodigy shortly after she and four mates had steered Kingfisher to a win in the Portsmouth-Baltimore leg of the EDS Atlantic Challenge. MacArthur was rushing to catch a plane back to Europe to go, you guessed it, sailing.

Continue reading here.