Ellen assessed

Ed Gorman gives his views on Ellen MacArthur's five year plan

See here for our story from the announcement of Ellen's five year plan with Kingfisher

Four years ago the then unknown Ellen MacArthur used to hit the phone and persuade you, bamboozle you and generally not give up until you fully understood, what her ambitions in life were - at that stage to race in the Mini-Transat, her first "professional" race.

These days - after being crowned offshore racing's world champion and amassing a possibly unsurpassable record of success in short-handed racing - "what Ellen is doing next" has become a very big deal indeed and you have to attend a large-scale press conference to get the gist of it.

Scores of journalists, including 30 who had flown over from Paris especially for the announcement, were there at a conference room at the London Boat Show to watch and listen on Thursday as Ellen and her manager, Mark Turner, put on a slick presentation with plenty of the inevitable operatic music backing up the video footage of Kingfisher in the Vendee Globe.

Nothing was given away in advance and, as we filed in, the chat was all about what we expected to hear. Some were spreading mischievous rumours that Ellen was going to shock us all by announcing her retirement - like any normal 25-year-old she was going to settle down and have children. Others, that she was carrying on in sport but not in sailing.

Ellen is, of course, not your normal 25-year-old by a long chaulk but she did surprise some of us, not so much by what she said she was going to do as much as what she ruled out, as she spoke confidently, without notes, dressed in black jeans and a crisp blue shirt emblazoned with the logo of her company, Offshore Challenges.

As we listened it became clear that neither this year's Around Alone Race nor the next Vendee itself in 2004 are on her menu. Apart from the Route du Rhum in which she will compete in Kingfisher later this year, a break with single-handing is the order of the day.

Another shrewd decision from the Turner-MacArthur partnership? Probably. After all why would anyone want to do either the Around Alone or the Vendee when, as one observer attending the launch and the champagne reception which followed put it, "the single-handed round-the-world box has been so well and truly ticked as far as Ellen is concerned".

Having done just about everything short of winning the Vendee, Ellen has far more to lose than to gain by returning to that race though another one, perhaps in 2008 or even 2012, has not been ruled out. Turner acknowledged as much in comments to madfor sailing afterwards. "I think she probably will do it again at some point," he said. "I think it will be pretty hard to go and follow it straight away and, from a sporting point of view, the multihull side has got a grip of her and I think it represents a higher bar."

The decision to move on to pastures new is very much in keeping with Mark and Ellen's laudable determination to keep widening their horizons and to try new aspects of a sport Ellen wants to explore in all its bewildering variety. But the new projects also underline how much she has enjoyed racing as part of a team, something which came over clearly in her presentation as we watched the winning scenes from the EDS Atlantic Challenge and the Challenge Mondial Assistance.

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