The Vendée Globe solo round-the-world sailing race ends with a thrilling sprint to the finish - The Globe and Mail

French skipper Charlie Dalin sails his Imoca 60 monohull 'Apivia' across the finish line of the 2020-21 Vendée Globe round-the-world solo race off the coast of Les Sables d'Olonne, France, on Jan. 27, 2021.

LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images

The Vendée Globe solo round-the-world race thrilled sailing fans with a tight sprint finish that was unique in the three-decade history of sport’s longest event – and one of its most dangerous.

At 8:35 p.m. European time, French skipper Charlie Dalin, aboard his yellow and white Apivia yacht, ended 80 days 6 hours 15 minutes 47 seconds at sea when he crossed the finish line first at the Vendée’s home port of Les Sables-d’Olonne in western France. Dalin swung from the rear mast stay in joy as a fleet of official race boats escorted Apivia into the harbour.

A few hours behind him was another French skipper, Louis Burton, who wasn’t far ahead of Germany’s Boris Herrmann. The trio were hunting for the strongest winds in what Vendée officials dubbed the “Battle of Biscay,” referring to the Bay of Biscay, scene of the flat-out, final charge.

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While Dalin was the first home, it was too early on Wednesday night to declare him the official winner because adjusted times have to be taken into account. Two of the top five skippers – Herrmann and France’s Yannick Bestaven – had been awarded compensation time for having helped in the rescue last month of Kevin Escoffier, whose carbon-fibre boat snapped in half in the Southern Ocean after smashing into a wave at high speed and sinking in two minutes.

French skipper Charlie Dalin, aboard his yacht on day 58.

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Herrmann had six hours of compensation time, which will be deducted from his overall time when he reaches the finish; Bestaven had 10 hours 15 minutes. As the night wore on, it seemed likely that Bestaven, Burton or Herrmann would bounce Dalin out of first place, though Herrmann had the great misfortune of colliding with a fishing boat just before 9 p.m. His boat was damaged but was still under way at a slower pace.

The upshot is that the final rankings for the top racers will not be known until some time Thursday morning, though it was Dalin who landed in the media spotlight for having reached terra firma ahead of the other 24 skippers who were still in the game. Eight skippers abandoned the race because of technical problems; all are safe.

The sailing world had never seen a finish like the 2020-21 edition of the Vendée, a physically and mentally punishing event that has been held every four years since 1989. Usually, the lead boats are well apart after circumnavigating the globe for more than two months, allowing the race to be called days ahead of the finish. This time, it was effectively a shootout among the top five skippers.

Jean Le Cam's yacht, seen from Boris Herrmann’s.

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Boris Herrmann on day 74.

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On Tuesday, when Herrmann, skipper of SeaExplorer/Yacht Club de Monaco, realized that his superb overall performance and compensation hours would probably hand him a podium spot, he said, “It is the most exciting moment I can ever imagine. … I am like a child at Christmas. I don’t know if I have ever been so excited.”

Sailing fans have been riveted to the race for days, aware that it would be too close to call until the final hours, and possibly not even then. Ross Tieman, a sailor and freelance writer who lives near Toulouse, France, followed the race from the start, as did a million sailing nuts on the Vendée’s Virtual Regatta. “No one has ever seen a finish like this, with five potential winners a day before the finish,” he said.

Sheer happenstance may have bunched the five racers together near the end, but Tieman thinks their proximity to one another, in effect, guaranteed their competitiveness. “My guess is that it was the effect of sailing in a pack,” he said. “When you have everyone so close, you try harder to go faster.”

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Kevin Escoffier is rescued by the French Navy off Jean Le Cam’s yacht.

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The Vendée was unique not just for a close finish, but also for its record number of female skippers. Six women started but there were two casualties because of equipment failures. One of them, the French-German skipper Isabelle Joschke, was routinely among the top 10, and once made it as high as fifth spot, before she dropped out on Jan. 9 with a wobbly keel.

As of Wednesday, the fastest female skipper was Clarisse Cremer, 31, a Parisian business-school graduate who placed second five years ago in the Mini-Transat, a solo transatlantic race. She was in 12th spot in her boat Banque Populaire X, putting her about 3,000 kilometres to the finish.

Another female skipper, Pip Hare, 48, of Britain – one of the few non-French racers – was 19th and trying to figure out how she would stay motivated and competitive in her peloton with two weeks to go before her arrival in Les Sables-d’Olonne.

“One of the things about solo racing as a sport is that it requires you to have this huge inner motivation anyway, because you are alone on the boat, there is no one else pushing you,” she said in a video posted Wednesday on the Vendée site. “But there is also no one holding you to account. ... There has to be an internal drive to want to do better, and I think the thing that drives me, the thing that motivates me, regardless of the competition around me, is to still in these final two weeks, get the best result I possibly can with this boat.”

Dalin ended 80 days, 6 hours, and 15 minutes at sea when he crossed the finish line.

JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP/Getty Images

The Vendée race is a marathon of more than 24,000 nautical miles (about 44,500 kilometres) that utterly exhausts the racers, all the moreso in the treacherous and frigid Southern Ocean, where they are lucky to snatch 20 minutes of sleep at a time. They sail 60-foot boats that are loaded with communications and navigation technology, allowing them to stay in near constant contact with their home teams.

The boats, most of them equipped with wing-like foils that allow the hulls to lift out of the water in strong winds, are capable of tremendous speeds. At their fastest, they can go more than 40 km an hour, allowing them to cover almost 1,000 kms on the best days.

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Three racers lost their lives in the event’s early editions, the last one being Gerry Roufs, a Montreal-born Canadian who went missing in savage winds somewhere near Point Nemo, the most remote spot in the South Pacific, in January, 1997. “The waves are not mere waves, they are Alps,” he told the race directors.

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2021-01-27 22:09:22Z
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