Ellen Back

‘TO build up Ellen MacArthur’s profile to the extent that the red-tops take notice her epic achievements, space reserved for images of her will be taken up by the pneumatic Lucy Pinder.

Sail of the century

So, look out for MacArthur telling us how she battled with a whale, icebergs, Pacific swells, burns, bruises and gear failures as she sailed around the globe while dressed in a Union Flag bikini and a saucy grin.

While we wait for the greatest sailor of her age to have her breasts enlarged and her face painted into a pout by the Star’s graphic gurus, the Telegraph spots the woman who has become the fastest sailor to circumnavigate the globe unassisted.

There she is on her B&Q boat, the only craft visible on the paper’s huge lead picture of Britain’s finest negotiating a cold and choppy sea around Cornwall.

And there she is on the Sun’s pages 4 and 5, fresh from an emergency bikini wax – she’s been 71 days at sea! – and telling us all that now she’s got the record what she really craves is a night on dry land with a randy footballer and a bottle of alcopop.

Well, not quite. The paper has left that interview for another time and today just celebrates “OCEAN’S ELLEN”, heaping deserved praise on the 28-year-old “heroine”, the “jubilant but exhausted Brit”.

And there’s our Ellen once more, this time on the Guardian’s cover page proper, a fist raised in triumph as she approaches the finishing line to her 27,000-mile voyage around the world.

Such is the nature of MacArthur’s single-minded determination and belief that it’s hard to bring ourselves to talk of the other crucial sporting matter of the day: Malcolm Glazer’s bid to buy Manchester United.

As the Indy reports, the gnome-like, ginger American with the chin-strap beard wants to take control of the country’s biggest football club.

The figures are laid out for anyone to see – he’ll borrow £300m from bankers JP Morgan with another £200-£250m coming from “preferred stock” – but the barrier to his success is more reliant on the size of his heart than his massive wallet.

And many United fans do not trust the man who would be their king.

This, as the Telegraph says, will be a truly hostile takeover in which United supporters opposed to the deal will use “dark arts” to block their man.

Says Oliver Houston of the group Shareholders United in the Telegraph: “We have members in 76 countries, including the Faroes, and they will all be mobilised against Glazer.”

And as we all know, he who gets the Faroes, wins the day…’

Posted: 8th, February 2005 | In: Back pages Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink