GO TANYA! THE WOMAN IS A GODDESS. Not only has she beaten the blokes with her world record free-dive, but she has managed to do it on her own terms: with perfectly polished fingernails and without spouting any claptrap about "being at one with the dolphins".
     It made my day when I heard that she had become the first woman to hold the No Limits world record. So am I delighted because women are rising to new sporting challenges? Or simply revelling in the crushed male egos and vast quantities of humble pie to be stomached by men who regard women as inherently inferior? Oooh, difficult (ha ha ha!)
     You've got to love Tanya - she looks like a supermodel and she is always seen with her dropdead-gorgeous husband. Let's be honest, if she showed any remote sign of not being 100% blonde girly fabulous, she'd immediately be labelled a lesbian and rumours would be whispered about her hormone levels.
     Blokes, in my experience, are not good losers at the best of times. Being beaten by a girl can send them into a frenzy of antagonism, as I discovered at 10 when I beat the local chess champion. Provoked by his mates' taunts, he responded by splitting my lip open with a chess box.
     So, Tanya - watch out for the inevitable backlash. I'm waiting for the previous "masters" of the sport to start saying "Free-diving? Oh, no, its not the sport it used to be. It's all too easy. Anyone can do it now."
     And I'm expecting to hear that free-diving is in fact easier for women because we have smaller lungs (easier to squash) and women's bodies have a different proportion of fat to muscle (so there's less oxygen-hungry tissue to supply).
     And then, Tanya, you could jam their heads into the nearest desk and slam the lid until they beg for mercy. It worked for me.
     As I write this, the annual GCSE results are causing huge angst. In my schooldays, boys got better results and no-one raised a murmur because this just demonstrated that they were brighter than girls. Now, however, there have to be 101 reasons why the girls are getting better results and, bizarrely, these have nothing to do with being smarter.
     So while I'm revelling in all this girl power, what have we really achieved? Well we now know that a woman is capable of squidging her lungs down to the size of peanuts, filling her ear cavities with blood, and enduring acute physical pain in order to ride a sled down to 160m and come back up on a balloon. Oh, hurrah! That'll come in handy.
     Tanya says she is not interested in records, she is interested in redefining her personal limits. Well, fair enough. But, strangely, the world pays attention when you break a record, while no-one gives a monkey's about how I redefined my personal limits with a world-class shopping extravaganza in the shoe department at Harvey Nicks.
     I recently came across a website about a man and woman in the States planning a 350m tandem dive on scuba gear. On the face of it, this is a scientific venture to explore the impact of an extreme dive on men and women. Then you get to the bit that reads: "If the world record at the time of our dive is more than 350m, we will go deeper... much deeper..." So, no element of ego involved there, then!
     Sending two individuals to extreme depth and measuring their physiological response is about as scientifically useful as locking Tony Blair and Ian Duncan-Smith in a sealed container to see which one suffocates first. And probably less entertaining.
     But should I feel surprised that in the competitive arena of death-defying deep dives, women are equally capable of reckless or attention-seeking behaviour? After all, when it comes to cunning stunts, we may have a natural advantage.