News Around the World


manager for the entire Offshore Racing division (from Mini to Ultim, including Figaro, Class40, Ocean Fifty and


Imoca) of the Incidence Group, which now includes Technique Voile and Delta Voile, as well as the Super Yacht range. He is also involved in the Incidence Technologie sector, which


manufactures membranes and filament products at its factory in La Rochelle. In short, Alexis is continuing his passion for his profession on a more comfortable footing. Beyond one-design and IRC, he tried Imoca with his friend Yoann


Richomme in some challenging conditions and really enjoyed it. He may do it again with Corentin Horeau. The possibility of a Vendée Globe does not displease him, as the boats are becoming increas- ingly similar in terms of performance, but ‘I’ll see later’… He is also friends (Alexis has many friends) with Anthony Marchand, the skipper of the Ultim Actual (formerly Gitana), a giant that impresses him. However, his immediate ambition would be to have his own


Class40, preferably a new boat. He knows this class well, having raced in the class in many Transat and Normandy Channel Races. His only gap as a ‘jack of all trades’ is the Ocean Fifty, but that doesn’t seem to be his cup of tea. He also doesn’t rule out returning to the Solitaire du Figaro, as if he wanted to taste victory again in the top academy for the world’s best solo ocean racing specialists. Asked about his greatest pride as such a successful sailor, Alexis


puts his Solitaire triumph last September at the top of the list. He also remembers his overall victory in the Fastnet in 2013 aboard the JPK 10.10 Night and Day. ‘It was a great first double-handed race with my father, who has been my best coach. We really didn’t expect it!’ He is also impressed by the potential of the new JPK 10.50, winner of the last Fastnet, although he admits that short- handed the boat is more physically demanding than a Figaro 3.


42 Class40 and 10 Ocean Fifties! The Class40 alone accounts for well over half of the entries in the biannual two-handed Transat Café l’Or (formerly Transat Jacques Vabre) from Le Havre to Fort de France in Martinique. The crews include women, mixed crews, foreigners, the ‘big guns’ of the class… and a famous ‘newcomer’: Michel Desjoyeaux, two-time winner of the Vendée Globe, who is racing on a new Class40 designed and built by himself and his team, together with its owner Alexandre Legallais. The boat is called Trim Control and has the number 210. But with so many excellent Class40 teams, and the level increasing every year, the competition is bound to be tough even for the famous Professeur. Two years after their victory in the TJV, Armel Le Cléac’h and


Sébastien Josse are defending their title in the Ultim category. The new foils installed at the beginning of the year and the new rudders added at the end of the summer have enabled the Maxi Banque Populaire XI to gain speed and performance, with the added bonus of being able to fly earlier. SVR Lazartigue, skippered by the duo Tom Laperche/Franck Cammas, is the favourite, having won the last few Ultim competitions including the Fastnet. There will be one notable absence, the new Gitana, whose launch has been delayed. However, their former boat, which has long been a force to be reckoned with in the category, will be in the race, competing now in the colours of the Actual team. In Imoca all eyes will be on Macif Santé Prévoyance, led by the


Anglo-French duo Sam Goodchild/Loïs Berrehar, who will attempt to repeat the boat’s victory two years ago. This will not be easy, as there are some big names in the field: the tandems Beccaria/ Ruyant and Richomme/Horeau, to name the entries from the Ocean Race Europe (but not the winner Paul Meilhat, who is absent from the Transat). Other frontrunners include the mixed duo of Eliès/ Bonafous on a boat very similar to Macif and Beyou/Lagravière on Charal. We won’t venture to predict the order of the top three. Finally, in the Ocean Fifty, the young Bourgnon, who was not


expected to race so soon on his new boat, will give the old hands a run for their money starting with the 2023 winner: Solidaires en Peloton of Thibaut Vauchel-Camus, who will be accompanied this time by Damien Seguin, hero of the Vendée Globe. One of the unique features of the Transat Café l’Or is that the four categories in contention take different courses to the West


22 SEAHORSE


Indies so that the boats arrive at Fort de France at roughly the same time: the Class40s take the most direct route with a mandatory passage through the Azores, the Imocas must pass through the Canary Islands, the Ocean Fifty boats via the Cape Verde Islands. Finally the Ultims must round the islets of São Paulo and São Pedro (which sit at the centre of the fluky Intertropical Convergence Zone!), then head for a waypoint near Ascension Island in the southern hemisphere, before finally setting course W/NW towards the finish line in Martinique!


A second Sodebo While several sponsors are exiting the sport, particularly in Imoca, others are developing their commitment to ocean sailing. Involved in sailing sponsorship since 1998, Sodebo is opening a new chapter in its history with the acquisition of an Ocean Fifty. In 2026 the Vendée-based company will be present on two circuits: Ultim and Ocean Fifty. For the first time it will also field two boats at the start of the Route du Rhum: Sodebo Ultim 3, skippered by Thomas Coville, and Sodebo Fifty, helmed by 31-year-old Léonard Legrand. With this new boat Sodebo intends to broaden both its commercial


and its sporting ambitions. Over the past 27 years Sodebo, which boasts the longest partnership between a sponsor and a skipper in the history of sailing, has continuously strengthened its commit- ment to the sport: a saga of five boats and six editions of the Vendée Globe as a major private partner. Founded in 1973 and now co-chaired by Marie-Laurence Gouraud,


Patricia Brochard and Bénédicte Mercier, the three daughters of the founders, Sodebo is recognised as one of the most loyal large sponsors of ocean racing. Sailing has always served Sodebo’s many different food brands well and now, by expanding its presence in sailing with an Ocean Fifty, the project takes on a new dimension with more races and therefore bigger audiences. It is important to note that with this new project the company is also endorsing the future of the Ocean Fifty class – which suffered some difficult growing pains in the first few years with Transat capsizes and some major technical failures. Patrice Carpentier


GREAT BRITAIN Meeow It was Jonathan Liew, the respected sports journalist writing in The Guardian newspaper hot from watching Paris 2024, who said what many of us think and know to be true but, as investors in the sport, choose to ignore. Liew wrote scathingly about sailing in the Olympics while arguing that the whole spectacle ‘needs to go on a diet before it does itself some serious harm’. Sailing was Liew’s number one pick for the chop, as he stated:


‘How many of you own a boat? How many of you could get access to a boat and – checks notes – a sea to sail it in? Of all the many anachro- nisms at the modern Olympics, sailing is perhaps the most conspicuous of all: a continuing sop to super-rich men who founded the Games and still just really love yachts, basically inaccessible to most of the countries in the world, even the ones with a viable coastline. ‘But socio-demographics is actually not the biggest issue here.


For an event whose defining motif is bringing people together in a place to celebrate sport, sailing is basically extraneous to the whole thing: marooned hundreds of miles away in some well-heeled harbour, basically unwatchable as a spectator sport, liable to be postponed if there is either no wind or too much wind, and with a set of penalty rules indecipherable to all but the most avid boat people, which as we’ve established, you are almost certainly not.’ Liew’s prickly resort to touchy and stereotypical historic charac-


terisations can largely be dismantled by the sport in minutiae, but the International Olympic Committee has been listening and has charged World Sailing with making the sport more appealing to a global television audience. And at September’s meeting of World Sailing a raft of new measures was voted in as a consequence. Widely reported, but worth recapping, World Sailing’s Events


Committee report focused in on aspects of event management for the LA28 Olympic Games, plus confirmed events to be put under review for Brisbane 2032. It stated: ‘For LA28 the report outlined 


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