Ellen MacArthur grew up in landlocked Derbyshire, England, born in 1976, and found sailing through books rather than a seafaring family. In 2001 she finished second in the Vendee Globe, the solo, nonstop, unassisted round-the-world race, aboard the monohull Kingfisher. At 24 she was the youngest competitor ever to complete it, and her women’s solo monohull circumnavigation record stood for two decades until Clarisse Cremer beat it in 2021. In 2004 she broke the women’s transatlantic record in the trimaran B&Q Castorama, beating times set by fully crewed boats.

In 2005 she sailed solo nonstop around the globe in 71 days, 14 hours, and 18 minutes, covering over 27,300 nautical miles at an average near 16 knots and beating Francis Joyon’s world record by more than a day. On a trimaran that would stay upside down if it capsized, she never slept more than 20 minutes at a time, relying on pre-race sleep mapping and piercing instrument alarms, and she experienced hallucinations. At 28 she became the youngest person made a Dame Commander, and France named her a Knight of the Legion of Honor. By 2009 and 2010 she had retired from racing and launched the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, built on a lesson from sea: a boat is a closed system of finite resources, and so is the planet’s economy.

• On Desert Island Discs she chose an SAS survival handbook and a fluffy worm mascot.
• She set the fastest celebrity lap on Top Gear in a Suzuki Liana, 1 minute 46.7 seconds, edging out Jimmy Carr.
• Asteroid 20043 and a sail-backed dinosaur from the Isle of Wight, Istiorachis macarthurae, carry her name.
• Her foundation promotes a circular economy that designs out waste instead of take, make, dispose.
• She launched a 2 million dollar plastic-waste innovation prize with the Prince of Wales, and her Cancer Trust takes young people recovering from illness sailing.