Tracy's choppy life

As Ellen MacArthur sailed into history and a massive fanfare, it was ironic that the tide of acclaim for her new solo round-the-world record should submerge the news of a comeback for the British sailor who provided her with the original blueprint for how to be a bloodyminded, faintly barking, obsessively driven heroine.

Thousands of miles away in Qatar, Tracy Edwards, who skippered the first all-woman crew to circumnavigate the globe and reinvented the concept of the yachtswomanassuperstar in the process back in 1990, was among the legions who sent messages of congratulations to MacArthur.

Like all of us, she confessed to being awestruck by an "incredible feat" of human endeavour. Unlike the rest of us, she was also in a position to say: "What she endured would have destroyed lesser human beings."

Yet with MacArthur's glory coming just a couple of days after the launch of Oryx Quest 2005, the round-the-world race between four of the fastest boats on earth for a million dollar prize which she has organised from the Gulf state, Edwards, these days the entrepreneur rather than the sailor, was resigned to the start of her brainchild being completely eclipsed back home.

On the face of it, this seemed typical of the pair's dramatically contrasting fortunes over the past 12 months, during which Edwards's reputation has been scraped through the mud. There were tales of massive unpaid debts, court battles with former friends, a drink-driving charge and the possibility of being left a homeless single mum with the threat of having her Berkshire house repossessed. Having read all about this, not to mention her two divorces and a failed relationship with the father of her five-year-old girl Mackenna, it was possible to imagine how the 42-year-old Edwards might cut a forgotten, chastened figure these days compared to the buoyant MacArthur.

Quite the contrary. She comes over as irrepressible as when the Maiden's voyage made her headline news. "I wish I had been forgotten over the last year because it was miserable time to find myself being ripped apart in newspapers," Edwards admitted from Doha yesterday. "But it's not in my nature to get low. Like Ellen, I'm a fighter, I just can't give up. It's in my nature and now our exciting adventure is off the ground, I don't feel forgotten at all. Sport moves on and Ellen should get the all recognition she deserves but I was the first and no-one ever forgets the first."