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It’s enough to send girls of a certain disposition running for the
smelling salts. Dashing TV presenter Ben Fogle is, l can reveal, to
undertake his biggest challenge yet - ¬rowing across the Atlantic naked.
But his legions of female fans will be disappointed: Ben is confining
his nudity to the high seas when he is ``beyond the gaze of excitable
landlubbers.
If this sounds a bit far-fetched, 30-year-old Ben assures me that the
epic 2,500-mile Atlantic Rowing race can be completed only by nude
oarsmen.
`I was as astonished as you were and thought it was all some huge joke,
but it didn't take me long to find out the organisers were utterly
serious,’ he tells me.
The extraordinary discovery came when Ben was three weeks into his
training for the race, devised by round-the-world yachtsman Sir Chay
Blyth.
'Apparently it's all to do with friction,' he says. `You are often
drenched by salty water and when it dries, your clothes chafe so much
that it's like being rubbed by sandpaper. And certain parts of your
anatomy suffer - ¬namely under your arms and between your legs:
Bryanston-educated Ben - who says he was so useless at rowing at school
that he gave up after three weeks - will be sharing his 20ft dinghy with
a so-far-¬unnamed rowing partner. He plans to film the crossing from the
Azores to Antigua, which he hopes to complete in under ten weeks.
`We will set off in clothes to protect our modesty but as soon as we are
out of sight of land, we will strip off,’ says Ben.
Handsome Fogle, who shot to fame on the BBC reality show Castaway, is no
stranger to endurance tests. Last year, he completed the gruelling
‘sands marathon’ across the Sahara Desert. |
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