Vendee Globe Preview - Mike Golding

Ed Gorman looks at the chances of Team Group 4 in the upcoming solo epic

The world's toughest yacht race - the Vendee Globe single-handed round-the-world race - is almost upon us and after the glories of the Olympics it is tempting to hope that even more success for British sailing is in the offing.

But it is no vain hope. Britain is prospering at the highest level in dinghies, in small keelboats and in single-handed Open 60 racing - and in Mike Golding we have a realistic potential race winner in the Vendee.

Golding first made his name through Chay Blyth's British Steel and BT Global Challenge races and it is fair to say there are those in British professional grand prix sailing who will always dismiss him for that. But those critics are wide of the mark.

Golding is no sprinter and round-the-cans has never been his speciality - even he admits his dalliance in the Admiral's Cup in 1995 was far from his finest hour. What he is good at is the sailing equivalent of marathon or cross country running. In this department there are few in the world who can match him for sheer grit and determination, together with a real sailor's skill for keeping his boat going in all weathers.

Golding demonstrated these qualities when he broke Sir Chay Blyth's solo westabout round-the-world record in a heavy steel-built 67ft Challenge yacht in 1993-94, and again in this summer's single-handed trans-Atlantic race when he held it together on Team Group 4 while many of his future Vendee rivals either retired or slowed down.

Set against that was his running aground off the northern tip of New Zealand while leading the Around Alone race in early 1999. This was the most agonising failure of his career, yet one which has left the former Berkshire firefighter stronger, calmer and with an undoubted sense that he has unfinished business in this form of racing.

Nearly two years later he comes to the start of the Vendee on November 5th as amongst the best-prepared of the 24 skippers who will line up in the biggest and most competitive single-handed race of its kind in history. The French are there in force as usual but it is significant that their own favourite, Michel Desjoyeaux, who sails the very advanced PRB, has already picked Golding as his main rival.

Among the best judges of Golding's true quality is Merfyn Owen, who oversaw the build of the Finot-designed Team Group 4 in 1997 and who was Golding's project manager until last year when he joined Ellen MacArthur's Kingfisher syndicate. Owen has an interesting take on the Cape Rienga disaster off New Zealand, which at the time seemed an unmitigated personal catastrophe for the inconsolable British skipper.

Owen argues that by then Golding and his team had already learned as much as they were ever going to about Team Group 4 and the sail and design modifications they wanted to make after testing her in the Southern Ocean. Golding himself had had the chance to race her in the deep south and yet the boat was then shipped home while her rivals had another 16,000 miles to go.

The accident allowed Golding to complete his major refit and any changes that were required to conform with the new safety rules in force for the Vendee much earlier than anyone else, all of which has meant that Team Group 4 - which Golding has since raced to two successive podium finishes in trans-Atlantics - has emerged as well-prepared for the Vendee as any of her rivals.

But Owen believes the most significant positive outcome has been in Golding himself. "It's made him a lot more mellow - he's always been an intense character because he searches for perfection but it's made him a lot more level-headed and a lot easier to work with," Owen said. "Until then he had had a good few years when nothing went wrong and then all of a sudden there was this - and it was obviously an error - and it's made him more aware that he can make mistakes and so he's less likely to make them in the future."

There's much in what Owen says, though clearly Golding would swap a win in the Around Alone any day for these incidental advantages. But, surveying his career in the round, there is undoubtedly a sense that it has all been leading up to this Vendee and this is his big moment coming up. If full international honours are going to come Golding's way, you sense it will be in this Vendee.

Boatwise, there are some advanced rig, rudder and keel configurations on show in the Vendee field and some newer hulls than Team Group 4. But Golding has not missed opportunities to improve his boat, which features a wingmast with deck spreaders and a canting keel, and his sail wardrobe from North Europe will be competitive. The size of the field and the match-up of so many newly-built and similar Open 60s is going to make this Vendee more of a fleet race than previously, and again Golding with his background in round-the-world one-design contests, should prosper in this setting.
As the oft-repeated cliche has it, "To finish first, first you have to finish." This is never more true than in single-handed sailing where people tend to lose races by breaking their boats or enough gear on them to make them uncompetitive. Golding paces himself well, seems largely unaffected by loneliness and is good at not breaking things on the boat.

When gear does fail, he has proved resourceful at finding solutions. So expect the former Berkshire fire-fighter to at least complete the 26,000-mile course. "If everything on the boat fails - which I don't expect to happen - he'll be the last guy sailing up the Atlantic even if he's holding it all together with bungee," said Owen.