In the ballooning world, the Gordon Bennett Cup, or the Coupe Aronautique Gordon Bennett, offers a challenge that's always hotly contested: who can fly the furthest.

The competition attracts pilots from all over the world. The inaugural race was in September 1906, when sixteen balloons took off from the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, France in front of a crowd of 200,000 spectators. The winners on this occasion were American pilots, Frank Lahm and Henry Hersey. They flew just over 400 miles and touched down on the northeast coast of England. Competitors in the 1910 event didn't have such a happy landing. They took off from St. Louis and the wind blew the ten balloons north into the wastes of Canada. The winners had two walk for four days to civilisation and some of the balloons were abandoned and not found for months. The competition continued every year until the First World War, then again until the start of the Second World War. It was revived in 1983 and is now once again an annual event, weather permitting, hosted by the country of the winner. The FAI (Fdration Aronautique Internationale) is the international governing body for air sports and sanctions the Gordon Bennett Cup. A team of enthusiasts has compiled a detailed history of the race, which you can find at http://www.fai.org and at http://www.coupegordonbennett.org

But who was this Gordon Bennett? If you're a British English speaker, you'll probably know "Gordon Bennett!" to be a somewhat outdated exclamation of disbelief and a euphemism for "God", "Gawd" and "Gor Blimey". The man's life seems to have been as colourful as a balloon's envelope and it's easy to imagine him as the source of the expression.

James Gordon Bennett was born in Scotland in 1795 and emigrated to America, where he founded the New York Herald in 1835. His son, also James Gordon Bennett, was born in 1841 and to keep things simple was known as Gordon Bennett. He was a marketing man and raised the profile of his father's newspaper by sponsoring Henry Morton Stanley's 1869 expedition to deepest, darkest Africa to look for David Livingstone. The journey took two years and we all know it had a happy ending because we remember Stanley's famous greeting, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" In the meantime, the New York Herald had enjoyed two years of exclusive coverage of the expedition, which did the paper's circulation no harm at all.

Gordon Bennett spent a lot of time in France and England and had a high profile in New York society. He was engaged to be married to socialite Caroline May, until he turned up late and drunk to a party at the family's New York mansion and urinated in the living room fireplace in front of his hosts. The scandal reportedly earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records under Greatest Engagement Faux Pas but it cost him his engagement and he had to leave New York in 1877.

He ended up in Paris and started an English language paper called the Paris Herald, now the International Herald Tribune. He continued to manage the New York paper from Europe and hoping to repeat his success with Stanley's expedition, he supported the voyage of George W. DeLong through the Bering Strait to the North Pole. DeLong and nineteen of his crew starved to death, but the newspaper's circulation flourished.

He was a co-founder of the Commercial Cable Company, a venture which broke New York financier Jay Gould's transatlantic cable monopoly.

Gordon Bennett sponsored elite sporting events and so assured his newspapers a steady stream of inside stories and exclusive interviews. He established the Westchester Polo Club in 1876, the first ever in America. He donated Gordon Bennett Cups for automobile racing, which gave rise to the Le Mans Grand Prix, for international yachting, boating, bicycling, powered flying machines and, in 1906, he provided the funds and a trophy for a gas balloon competition.

The winners of the 2005 Gordon Bennett Cup were Belgian pilots Bob Berben and Benoit Simons. Gordon Bennett 2006 will take place in Waasmunster, Belgium, starting on 9th September.