Frenchman Yannick Bestaven celebrates after winning the Vendée Globe solo round-the-world sailing race on Jan. 28, 2021, in Les Sables-d'Olonne, France.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. But his glory would not last long. Hours hater, another French sailor, Yannick Bestaven, was declared the winner on adjusted time, pushing Dalin into second spot. France’s Louis Burton came in third.
Two of the top five skippers – Bestaven and Germany’s Boris Herrmann – 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.Supplied
Herrmann had six hours of compensation time, which will be deducted from his overall time when he reaches the finish; Bestaven had a hefty 10 hours 15 minutes, which ultimately allowed him to win the race.
Herrmann would have landed on the podium, and possibly placed first, but had the great misfortune of colliding with a fishing boat just before 9 p.m on Wednesday while he was asleep. His damaged boat was limping into port Thursday morning. “I’m really gutted,” he said in a video posted on the race site.
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, with the final charge dubbed the “Battle of Biscay,” after the Bay of Biscay off the French coast.
Jean Le Cam's yacht, seen from Boris Herrmann’s.Supplied
Boris Herrmann on day 74.Supplied
On Thursday morning, 19 skippers were still racing, some of them thousands of nautical miles from the finish. Eight skippers abandoned the race because of technical problems; all are safe.
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.”
Kevin Escoffier is rescued by the French Navy off Jean Le Cam’s yacht.Supplied
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.”
French skipper Charlie Dalin sails his Imoca 60 monohull 'Apivia' across the finish line off the coast of Les Sables d'Olonne, France, on Jan. 27, 2021.LOIC VENANCE/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.
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.