Ravussin and Bidegorry join the D35s

Brittany heads to Switzerland: An update on this year's Challenge Julius Baer on Lake Geneva

The Décision 35s, once again competing in their eight race championship the Challenge Julius Baer 2009 on Lake Geneva, will see their ranks swelled to 11 boat this year with the addition of two new teams led by well known ORMA 60 skippers Switzerland’s Stève Ravussin and Banque Populaire skipper and former Solitaire du Figaro winner, Pascal Bidegorry.

Ravussin will be helming the new SUI 11 Veltigroup, having occasionally crewed on board Zen Too during the 2008 Challenge Julius Baer. “With Veltigroup, we will undertake this new competitive challenge… Let’s say that 2009 will be the year of occasional wins and learning and then from 2010 we’ll try to take the Championship!” says Ravussin.

For Bidegorry and his SUI 12 Banque Populaire, the D35 sailing will punctuate his schedule for record breaking on board his Banque Populaire maxi trimaran (currently on stand by in Spain for an attempt on the Route of Discovery record from Cadiz to San Salvador in the Bahamas).

Ravussin and Bidegorry are the latest skippers to have made the migration from Brittany to Lake Geneva following on from Loick Peyron, who regularly races on Nicolas Grange’s Okalys, Alain Gautier who competes on board his D35 Foncia, Karine Fauconnier, who sails Dona Bertarelli Späth’s Ladycat and Franck Cammas who occasionally guests on Zen Too.

While there are two new boats at present one of the existing teams may not be racing this year, due to watch manufacturer Chopard withdrawing their sponsorship.

The season gets underway with the newly renamed Grand Prix Corum from 8-10 May at the Société Nautique de Genève. The Swiss watch manufacturer has also formed an alliance with Nicolas Grange’s team, that will now be called Okalys-Corum. Loick Peyron will once again be sailing the whole season with Grange and will be having a heavily cat-orientated year, flitting between this and skippering the Oman 2 boat in the iShares Cup, while trying to remember which boat is which (tailored for racing on Lake Geneva, the D35s are shorter but come with considerably more sail area than the Extreme 40s).



Dona Bertarelli Späth (above) will return once again with her all-female crew on Ladycat with former ORMA 60 skipper Karine Fauconnier helming most of the time. This year the team have been augmented by Nathalie Brugger who represented Switzerland in the Laser Radial in Beijing, where she finished sixth.

Dona Bertarelli Späth filled thedailysail in on the situation: “She [Nathalie] is coming on board as a trimmer and basically the rest of the team is staying the same. Ophelie [Theron] is staying as a trimmer as well but she had a knee injury and she hasn’t recovered 100%. So if something happens she will stand in in whatever position. She is very flexible.” In order to make the minimum crew weight limits for the D35 class rule, the all-women crew are able to sail with one extra on board, seven in total.

This year Ladycat are working more closely with brother Ernesto’s Alinghi D35 team. Prior to each race they will be training for three days, from Wednesday until Friday and will be two boating a lot more with Alinghi. “We will be at the same base and we will try – maybe in the morning we will be training alone and in the afternoon we’ll be training with Alinghi,” continues Bertarelli Späth. “And Pierre-Yves Jorand has taken control of the technical supervision of both boats. He was running just Alinghi before and all the technical aspects of Ladycat is being supervised by him. So the boat is now with Alinghi in Alinghi’s base and the sails are down in Valencia.”

Having the might of her brother’s double America’s Cup winning team behind them will certainly improve their chances of taking on the men this season, however Bertarelli Späth is aware that the bar has been raised again for this season with the fresh influx from Brittany.

“There are no amateurs any more, they are all professional teams,” she says. “So if sometimes we are managing to do something unbelievable, I think this year it is going to be even harder to do it frequently. So if we can manage to stay in the middle of the fleet, that is going to be a huge achievement.

“Last year we finished not far from the fifth place. We came seventh because the last two regattas were in very windy conditions, when we are at a disadvantage. If we hadn’t had those windy conditions – we were up there, we were fighting for fifth or fourth place. This year, you never know. There are new teams, even though they are great sailors, if the wind is with us and a bit of luck and a lot of work then maybe we will do at least as good. If we win a couple of races it will be a huge success, even if we don’t win a Grand Prix.”

Challenge Julius Baer schedule for 2009:

8-10 May Grand Prix Corum – SNG
23-24 May Grand Prix Romandie.com Act I – Rolle
6 June Genève – Rolle – Genève
13 June Bol d’Or Mirabaud
27-28 June Grand Prix Romandie.com Act II – Versoix
22-23 August Open de Nyon
5-6 September HP Cup La Réserve
18-20 September Grand Prix Beau-Rivage Palace

Teams:
SUI1 Alinghi - Ernesto Bertarelli
SUI2 Okalys-Corum - Nicolas Grange/Loick Peyron
SUI3 Julius Baer - Philippe Cardis
SUI4 Zen Too - Guy de Picciotto/Franck Cammas
SUI5 Foncia - Alain Gautier
SUI7 Zebra 7 - Loïc Forestier
SUI8 Romandie.com - Frédéric Moura
SUI9 Smart Home - Christian Michel/Fred le Peutrec
SUI10 Ladycat - Dona Bertarelli Späth/Karine Fauconnier
SUI11 Veltigroup - Steve Ravussin
SUI12 Banque Populaire - Pascal Bidegorry

2008 Challenge Julius Baer results:
1. SUI 1 - Alinghi 11pts
2. SUI 5 – Foncia 19pts
3. SUI 2 – Okalys 26pts
4. SUI 4 – Zen Too 27pts
5. SUI 6 – Cadence 38pts
6. SUI 3 - Julius Baer 38pts
7. SUI 10 – Ladycat 40pts
8. SUI 7 – Zebra 7 46pts
9. SUI 9 - Smart Home 47pts
10. SUI 8 - Romandie.com 60pts