A trivial race or a major turning point in ocean racing? Six big names in sailing will set off from Brest this Sunday for the first edition of the Arkea Ultim, a round-the-world trip with a stopover (unlike the Vendée Globe, where they are prohibited). This “Champions League” of skippers will put maxi-trimarans to the test of circumnavigation in a race that intends to go down in history. It will also offer a new challenge to experienced sailors like Armel Le Cléac’h, who is returning to a solo round-the-world trip after winning the Vendée Globe in 2017.
Recent winner of the Jacques Vabre transatlantic race on his Maxi Banque Populaire, “the jackal” is finally successful in a category that he took a little time to tame. He will undoubtedly make the favorites, and it is not a little Covid-19 contracted at the dawn of the holidays, which came to disrupt his physical preparation a little, which begins his enthusiasm before the big departure.
You completed a world tour in an Imoca. How will the effort be different in Ultim?
Maneuvering these boats alone is the most difficult thing in sailing. We are on the fastest, biggest, most powerful boats. Everything is “more”, except us sailors who are roughly the same height, with the same muscles. You have to be physically sharp to be able to tame these boats. Because the maneuvers are much longer than on Vendée Globe boats.
Concretely, what does that mean?
A tack, in Optimist it lasts two seconds, in Figaro it will last a minute, in Imoca ten minutes, and for us half an hour. It’s a lot of physical effort. We spend a lot of time turning the column, the kind of coffee grinder [avec deux poignées]. That burns after a while, and if you do several tacks, it takes a toll on the body. Not being physically prepared means being less effective and it’s a vicious circle: the more we get tired, the less lucid we are in reasoning, in maneuvers and everything goes in the wrong direction. You must have the ability to continue over a long course. It therefore involves a lot of resistance and endurance.
How did you work, physically?
We work a lot on cardio. The hand cycle, we work on it with power sensors, so I know depending on the type of maneuver how long it will last, at what power I will use the column to maneuver. The idea is to be efficient without burning out. Everything is calculated, measured, we work with a physical trainer with whom we set up a specific program. We also work a lot on the prevention part, to avoid injuries. We are always moving on the boat so we place a lot of emphasis on core strength and muscle strengthening to avoid getting injured or hurting our backs.
Beyond the fact that it will pit maxi-trimarans against each other, the Ultim Challenge allows stopovers, unlike the Vendée Globe. Will there be a “passage to the pits” aspect like in F1?
The rule is clear. We have the right to stop to repair, which is a major difference with the Vendée Globe. But there is a minimum of 24 hours per stopover. You can stop as many times as you want during the route, within this limit. Twenty-four hours is a heavy penalty, because with these boats you can cover 600 miles in that time.
In addition to that, the stopovers will necessarily be detours. Except, perhaps, off the coast of Brazil?
Indeed, and that’s why it won’t be like in F1, where going to the pits involves a loss of seconds. Example: if we want to stop in the South Seas, the first possible stopover would be Australia or New Zealand and, after the Pacific, in the south of Argentina after passing Cape Horn. In fact, there are few places where you can stop, especially with very large boats. The most interesting stopover, yes, that would be Brazil. On the way down and even up the South Atlantic, we often pass near the Brazilian coast because the weather there is the most interesting. The detour would be less important there. But there are those 24 hours left no matter what.
We can therefore imagine that only major mechanical glitches will force the shutdown.
Quite. If we ever have a major problem and we want to stop, we must be able to give our teams time to travel and get to the site. If I decide to stop in Brazil and I decide that only three hours before arriving at the port, my team will laugh in my face. We don’t have private jets with teams who can disembark with the snap of their fingers. The stopover is an element of not abandoning the race. This is what we wanted because it is a race with fewer boats than in the Vendée Globe. These boats are very complicated to repair alone, we can do some DIY, a little mechanics, electronics, a little composites, but on the scale of a single man, we are not going to change a foil, repair a sail at sea, do what you can do on smaller boats. The stopover will be interesting in this sense.
Was the emphasis placed by the organizers on the fact that the fleet must arrive in full? Is it important that everyone finishes this race?
It will always be better if everyone finishes, but chances are there won’t be six boats at the finish. It remains a very long race and today, no flying boat has completed a circumnavigation of the world under sail. [sur son record du monde, François Gabart disait n’avoir volé qu’une infime partie du parcours] so it remains a perilous exercise. But yes, we want to write the first pages of a first major sailing race. For me, it will become the most difficult solo race, like the Vendée Globe is today. Doing it in Ultim, with these boats, is much harder, much more intense. We’re potentially going to go around the world in one month less at sea, it’s incredible.