What makes Ellen so special?

James Boyd analyses Ellen MacArthur's solo sailing success

She's a pint size girl from Derbyshire in the middle of England and yet at the tender age of 26 has already become the most successful singlehanded offshore racer the UK has ever seen - as well as being the most famous - and is well on the way to becoming one of the 'all time greats' internationally within this ambitious corner of our sport.

So why is Ellen MacArthur so good? Why does she repeatedly beat the experienced Mike Golding, the most highly capped of British solo sailors?

The answer was perhaps summed up on her approach to Pointe a Pitre on Friday night. About four miles from the line and with a more than comfortable lead over second placed Mike Golding Ellen decided wasn't going fast enough. When 99.9% of average mortals would have thought - "to hell with it, I'll cruise across the line and savour the moment" - Ellen went to change from the Solent to the genoa. Not only this but she chose to peel rather than carry out the change bareheaded - a more efficient change if you were sailing with a full crew, but a ball breaking manoeuvre for a singlehanded sailor.

So Ellen is hugely driven and cannot rest if the boat is not sailing to the optimum. At one point it seemed likely that this kind of motivation stemmed from Ellen being a young girl trying to prove herself to her peers, but with a win in the Europe 1 New Man STAR, second place in the Vendee Globe and now the Route du Rhum monohull win, she has nothing left to prove in this respect. It seems that Ms MacArthur is just plain competitive.

Aside from being driven and focussed, Ellen is also highly trained. She has studied boat v boat racing with Olympic sailor Paul Brotherton, weather and strategy with Jean-Yves Bernot, sleep management with Dr Claudio Stampi. Importantly and despite her young age, she has also had more experience sailing on a variety of Open class monohulls than anyone in the UK ever has.

1996, aged 20, Ellen worked on Open 60s including the narrow Jean-Luc van den Heede yawl Alan Wynn-Thomas was racing in the OSTAR. She did the delivery trip back across the Atlantic on her and then jumped ship to join Italian Vittorio Malingri's Open 60 for the fully crewed Quebec-St Malo that year - her first race on board an Open 60.

There was the Mini Transat where she teamed up with Mark Turner in a two boat team - a union that has since become Offshore Challenges. In this Ellen finished 17th overall while Turner was 5th. In a fleet of 52 starters and sailing a fairly average boat, this was a good result and a sign of things to come for Ellen.

She sailed the 1998 two handed Round Britain Race on an Open 50 with David Rowan but more significant was the Route du Rhum later that year. Having taken a back seat from sailing to manage Ellen, Turner persuaded the retail giant Kingfisher (owner of Woolworths, B&Q and their French equivalents) to make a trial sponsorship of Ellen in this race. Sailing Pete Goss' former Vendee Globe Open 50, Ellen put in another top performance - fifth monohull home and first Open 50, ahead of several Open 60s.

Then once Kingfisher had been convinced that they should progress the sponsorship, as part of her Open 60 training Ellen sailed with guru Yves Parlier in the two handed Transat Jacques Vabre in 1999 on board the radical Aquitaine Innovations.

Obviously on board Kingfisher she has now covered 10,000s of miles with the delivery from her builders in New Zealand, then the OSTAR, Vendee Globe, EDS Atlantic Challenge, etc.

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