Fly boy Simon to separate the boys from the Mr?

BAKE a cake, build a raft, climb a mountain and take part in a fashion photo-shoot may sound like the average daily agenda for the modern housewife, but it’s not — this is what the world of Mr World is like.

For the past three weeks the greatest assemblage of walking six-packs since Ben Hur, have been in Sanya, China, running, prancing, posing and generally throwing well-toned shapes.

Tomorrow, the contestants will stop pulling their generously gelled hair out, because that is the day on which the winner will be announced.

Irish hopes are pinned on the pecs of Simon Hales, a 24-year-old architectural technologist. He’s a fly boy in the truest sense of the word whose main ambition is to get his pilot’s licence.

He also has a love of sport: football, rugby, swimming and gym training topped his hit list. If he wins, it may be his ambition to end world suffering, but he has also expressed an interest in continuing his world peregrinations, he has already travelled extensively in Thailand and Australia.

For the past three weeks, Simon and his pumped up peers have been taking on the challenges designed to separate the boys from the Mr. These included running a gruelling 2.5 kilometre trail straight up a mountain through pristine rainforest and cooking sweet and sour prawns.

When the Miss World contest was started in the 1950s, a similar event was staged for men in an attempt to stem the sniffles of those who felt they as much to offer as the ladies. It never took off.

In 1994, the Miss World Organisation felt that if tried again, a contest drawing the most desirable men from around the world might be well received.

And the rest, as they might say, is histrionics.