Vendée Globe: The final push towards home
by The Ocean Race 13 Jan 15:42 GMT
MACIF Santé Prévoyance skipper Charlie Dalin (FRA) © Ronan Gladu / Disobey / Macif
French skippers Charlie Dalin and Yoann Richomme are on track to lead the Vendée Globe fleet across the finish line off Les Sables d'Olonne, setting a new race record in the process.
As fans of offshore racing, all of us here at The Ocean Race have been watching the event with keen interest, as the sailors throughout the fleet take on a very personal challenge, under a very public lens.
On Monday, with the leaders just hours away from the finishing line, and most of the fleet around Cape Horn and out of the Southern Ocean, two key elements stand out from this 10th edition of the Vendée Globe: speed and resilience.
"The IMOCA boats have never been faster or more reliable," notes Antoine Mermod, the President of the IMOCA Class, as the leaders close in on the finish. He thinks both aspects are related and in part connected to the participation of many teams and sailors in the last edition of The Ocean Race, the fully-crewed, around-the-world race, where IMOCA teams competed for the first time in 2023.
"Already we can see the race record of 74 days, set by Armel Le Cléac'h in 2016-17, is about to be broken by a considerable amount. In the last Vendée Globe, the top sailors would have days of 450-500 nautical miles, and the record over 24 hours was 532 miles. Now, they're doing days between 500 and 580 miles, and the new 24-hour record is 615 miles (set by Sébastien Simon on Groupe Dubreuil, on board the winning boat of The Ocean Race in July 2023, which is a phenomenal gain."
Equally impressive is the reliability of the boats in the fleet, from the new generation boats of the leaders, through to the older boats further back in the fleet. To this point, just six of 40 boats have been forced to retire, a very low attrition rate by historical standards.
"Over the past few years, new events have been added to the IMOCA Globe Series Championship, the most significant being The Ocean Race," Mermod says. "This has allowed many sailors and boats to get real world Southern Ocean experience in the most competitive, fully-crewed, offshore race, and apply that experience to their preparation for this Vendée Globe."
During The Ocean Race stopover in Itajaí, Brazil, following the longest Southern Ocean leg in the history of The Ocean Race from Cape Town, all the key suppliers of equipment to the IMOCA Class came to see the boats, evaluate the equipment, and measure the impact of 35 days of hard racing through the southern latitudes. This feedback loop had a positive impact on preparation for the current Vendée Globe actual fleet.
Mermod thinks that speed and reliability are closely related: "When you know your boat and equipment well, it's been tested, and seen the limits, you can push harder and race closer to 100%. Reliability and confidence allows for top performance."
The race won't be completed until the sailors and their boats cross the finishing line, but it's heartening to see the current podium positions held by those with close ties to The Ocean Race, including Charlie Dalin, Yoann Richomme and Seb Simon, all three of whom raced legs in the crewed, round-the-world race two years ago.
After them, there are another five sailors from The Ocean Race battling it out for top ten positions* on the Vendée Globe leaderboard.
"It's been an amazing race to watch and it is clear there is now a positive feedback loop within the IMOCA Class where the lessons learned by the sailors and teams in the top fully-crewed event - The Ocean Race - are applied into the Vendée Globe, resulting in record-breaking performances," said Phil Lawrence, the Race Director of The Ocean Race.
"And I'm sure in the debriefs after this race, we will find that the sailors and teams have more ideas and learnings to apply and test out in the upcoming fully-crewed events, starting with The Ocean Race Europe in August.. It's a positive development for the class, the sailors and us as race organisers."
As fans of good ocean racing, we offer our congratulations to all the Véndee Globe sailors as they make their approach towards the finish.
*Sam Goodchild, Paul Meilhat, Nicolas Lunven, Boris Herrmann and Justine Mettraux are currently all in the top 10.