Golding the tenacious

Ed Gorman finds out what it is like to live in the shadow of Ellen

Imagine you are Mike Golding. You've gone from being a record-breaking singlehander and a successful skipper in the BT Global Challenge to the full professional circuit in an Open 60. You have performed perfectly respectably and, what is more, you have a good story to tell with highs, like coming third in the 1999 Transat Jacques Vabre, and lows, like running aground while leading the Around Alone, and the media and sponsors are lapping it up.

Then along comes a certain Ellen MacArthur. While you are cruelly dismasted at the start of the Vendee Globe and bravely re-group to finish seventh, she dazzles and delights millions around the world by almost winning it at her first attempt and sets numerous records along the way. Suddenly you are left struggling to keep your head above water in an area of the sport you once dominated and everyone seems to be forgetting that Britain has at least two top singlehanded ocean racers, not one.

Golding, the former Berkshire fire-fighter, knows, probably more than anyone, the impact that Ellen has made in British sailing. Although it is undoubtedly an entirely positive one, and one which many of us hope will inspire many young imitators, there is an obvious downside for rivals like Golding who are trying to keep their own careers on track and hook their own major sponsors.

Over the past four years Ellen and her manager Mark Turner have gone from being minor players to virtually the only story in British sailing, especially as far as the mainstream press is concerned. Now it seems, no matter what event Ellen enters, it will be she who gets the coverage while other competitors from Britain are left eclipsed and in the margins.

A recent example was the 2001 Transat Jacques Vabre. Ellen and Alain Gautier finished second in the multihull fleet in Kingfisher-Foncia. But theirs was a far better publicised runner's-up spot than that achieved by Golding and Marcus Hutchinson in Ecover in the monohulls. Other Brits were lucky even to get mentions in most reports and were virtually invisible to the general public. Few got to hear much about Emma Richards or Alex Bennett. Even Mark Turner, who co-skippered Kingfisher with Nick Moloney, was racing on the dark side of his own moon in PR terms and struggled for profile, despite finishing in third place.

Of course no-one begrudges Ellen her success and Golding certainly doesn't. The former Team Group 4 skipper is nothing if not a realist. He recognises that there is no way he can compete in PR terms with Ellen and what she achieved in her first Vendee Globe. Yet he is determined not to allow her career to dictate his own. In fact he looks at her participation, or lack of it, in any race or event as a potential bonus to him, either way. If she is taking part, the overall profile of the event is increased, to his advantage; if she is not among the competitors, his own profile is enhanced.

"In fairness," Golding told madfor sailing, "I can't compete with a 25-year-old girl. Of course she is going to be a more attractive story to the broader public. But I don't want to allow my personal objectives to become steered by what Ellen is doing - obviously there are things I would like to do, but I'm not deliberately steering away or otherwise from anything that Ellen is doing."

As far as the TJV goes, Golding openly accepts that Ellen stole the lion's share of the coverage. He believes that is partly to do with the greater resources being put into PR by the Kingfisher campaign than by his own relatively modest current sponsor, Ecover. "While MPR did a good job promoting Ecover and there were some spin offs for me in that, we have had no one promoting Mike Golding Yacht Racing in the same way Offshore Challenges have done with Ellen."

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Mike relieved after finishing second in the Transat Jacques Vabre's monohull class