Vendee Globe - Preview

With storms battering Northern Europe, British Vendee supporters are struggling to find a ferry that will take them across the Channel to France - while Ed Gorman takes a first look at the fleet that will race alone, non-stop around the world

There are few events in world sport that come close to matching the Vendee Globe single-handed non-stop round-the-world race. In fact, the only things that come to mind are not sporting events at all - but tests of endurance like walking across deserts or climbing Himalayan peaks solo and without oxygen.

Solo alpine-style climbing is the closest comparison in many ways. The individual is on their own against the elements, there is the constant danger that a mistake could cost you your life and you are governed entirely by the weather. A fine-weather assault on a distant peak can turn into a struggle for life itself, if conditions turn against you.

But while climbing compares with racing an Open 60, it is at worst a game of risk management spread over a matter of hours or a few days. Compare that with sailing non-stop for over a hundred days when - almost inevitably - you are going to encounter some of the most unbelievable weather that the earth is capable of producing, and probably more than once.

In the good old days when sailing round-the-world alone was considered an incredible feat, yachtsmen went slowly, in relatively heavy displacement boats and hove-to in the worst of the weather. These days the Vendee Globe is an out-and-out Formula 1-style sprint, and the 22,000-mile course has become just another race track. We've all but forgotten about the challenge of loneliness and the grinding mental poverty of spending days and days at sea on your own; now it's all about winning, tactics and strategy.

The boats themselves are on the very limit of what is either sensible or possible. Capable of stunning downwind and offwind performance, they feature huge rigs and massive sail areas together with sophisticated foil arrangements, which make them an enormous challenge for the lone sailor. New safety and stability rules make the current generation of 60s theoretically safer than four years ago, but these are still yachts which crash all too easily.

This year the Vendee Globe is setting a new standard with the biggest and easily the most competitive fleet lining up at the French Biscay port of Les Sables D'Olonne. While in the past, the race has accommodated everything from fully tricked-up racers to eccentric adventurers in tired boats, this time round the emphasis has swung very definitely and, one suspects irreversibly, towards the racer. Of the 24 entrants, 21 are sailing 60 footers and 11 of those have been built for this race.

It seems that the succession of near-disasters and dramatic rescues in the last Vendee four years ago - Raphael Dinelli, Thierry Dubois and Tony Bullimore were all picked up in the Southern Ocean - plus the death of Gerry Roufs who was swept off his Open 60, Groupe LG2, 2,600 miles west of Cape Horn, have done nothing to put people off. If anything, the drama of 1996-97 has drawn people to the Vendee, or back to it, with no less than nine of the 24 starters having attempted the race before.

Another big difference this time is that the French, who have won all three runnings of this classic, are facing a real prospect of losing their title to a foreigner with two Britons - Mike Golding and Ellen MacArthur - and one Swiss sailor, Dominique Wavre, all in the top-eight of those considered likely to take the title. There are two other British entrants, Josh Hall and Richard Tolkien, but neither are considered potential winners.
Winning the Vendee, like any yacht race, requires a combination of factors. A good boat for starters, it's got to be on the pace, it must be reliable in every respect - rig, foils, autopilots - and you need an advanced grasp of weather and routing plus the instincts of a fleet racer. Then you need luck and the ability to pace yourself and your boat to last the course. In past races, the attrition rate has been very high. In 1989 only seven of the 13 starters finished; in 1992 seven made it out of 14, while last time only six out of 16 got back to Les Sables.

Probably the biggest factor is reliability plus redundancy if things go wrong. Christophe Auguin, who won the last race in Geodis, (which goes again this time skippered by Bernard Gallay), summed it up as he celebrated his crushing victory when he returned to France in a boat that was almost unscathed. "I know that I won it before the start during the year spent in the shipyard - I had no damage, no huge problem." he said.

Madforsailing will be looking at the Vendee field in more depth in the run-up to the start on November 5th. The key players however are expected to be: from France, Michel Desjoyeaux (PRB), Thomas Coville (Sodebo), Catherine Chabaud (Whirlpool), Thierry Dubois (Solidaires), Yves Parlier (Aquitaine Innovations), Bernard Gallay (voila.fr), Roland Jourdain (Sill), and Marc Thiercelin (Activewear); from Britain, Mike Golding (Team Group 4) and Ellen MacArthur (Kingfisher); and from Switzerland, Dominique Wavre (Open Suisse UBP).

Desjoyeaux - the "professor" - starts as favourite because of his combination of consummate solo racing skill (he has won the Figaro twice), excellent routing and his mastery of the technical aspects of Open 60s. His rig, which features a wingmast with hinged spreaders, proved an Achilles' heel in the single-handed trans-Atlantic this summer, but has been re-worked and is now thought to be strong. Coville has a formidable record in short-handed and offshore sailing including winning the Route du Rhum in 1997. But his boat also has question marks over its rig. Originally Sodebo was built to accommodate a canting mast, but this was banned and the new wingmast fitted for last summer's single-handed trans-Atlantic race was one of three to fail in the first major storm of the race.

Wavre will be a potent threat in the 1999-vintage Finot/Conq-designed Open Suisse UBP which features a fixed keel and a keel-stepped wingmast, as will Jourdain whose Marc Lombard-designed Sill is a sistership to Chabaud's Whirlpool. Gallay could be the surprise package in the old Geodis which has been fitted with a swing keel and daggerboards and has been ready for months. For the boat it will be the second time around as it will for Gallay who competed in the second Vendee.

For Britain, Golding comes to the start with a real chance of glory, having compiled two podium finishes in two successive trans-Atlantics in Team Group 4 and shown in the 1998-99 Around Alone that he was a potential winner - until he ran aground off New Zealand. MacArthur remains a good outside prospect having won this year's single-handed trans-Atlantic race but having never tried her hand at a non-stop circumnavigation.