A LONG WAY ROUND

THE OCEAN GLOBE RACE WAS ALL ABOUT BRINGING BACK THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY WHITBREADS. ELAINE BUNTING FINDS OUT HOW THE CREWS FARED

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When Don McIntyre devised the Ocean Globe Race, he imagined a revival of sailing's greatest era of adventure. The early Whitbread Round the World Races made headlines beyond the sport of offshore racing: they created legends. Half a century on, this new race could never fully recapture the same race fever and romance, but it did write some fabulous new endings.

In April, after 145 days of racing, the 73ft ketch Pen Duick VI crossed the finish line at Cowes to win line honours. Marie Tabarly was skippering the boat her father, Éric, built to win the Whitbread. The greatest race eluded him twice, and in 1998, when Marie was 13, he was lost overboard in the Irish Sea. With this win, Marie, now 39, has completed the Pen Duick story in her own name.

Eight days later, Maiden took the overall race win on handicap. In the 1989/90 Whitbread, Maiden skipper Tracy Edwards demonstrated that women could race on equal terms (not a given at the time - a rival horridly dismissed her all-female crew as 'performing seals'). Now in the hands of skipper Heather Thomas and a crew of 12 young women, the Maiden team claimed the title of the first all-female crew to win a round the world race.

With its throwback rules shunning modern electronics and technology, the Ocean Globe Race has curiously ended up reflecting back deep social changes. Yet the challenge itself is much as it was back then: the feat of pushing big, labour-intensive yachts and large crews for up to 40 days at a stretch. Marie Tabarly called Pen Duick "a colossus to manoeuvre, a beast", which sums up the lion-taming required of these old ocean racers.

PHYSICAL RACING