THE TOUGHEST RACE ON EARTH
One sailor bit off his tongue and had to sew it back on in the middle of the ocean, another lay for three days with a broken back and couldn’t reach the painkillers — so can Alex Thomson survive the Vendee Globe?
ALEX THOMSON scrunches up his face as he considers the horrors that happen at sea. He has frequently stared at disaster in his pursuit of the Vendee Globe but knows there are others who have had it worse.
‘There’s this French guy, a solo sailing legend called Bertrand de Broc, who bit his tongue off,’ he says. ‘Off. Just imagine that for a second.’
The story goes that De Broc, now 56, was hit in the face by a loose rope during a storm in the 1993 Vendee and bit right through his tongue. ‘He’s on the boat all by himself, remember,’ says Thomson. ‘He ends up having to sew it back on in the middle of the ocean, bouncing along and trying to stick a needle in his tongue.’
Thomson shakes his head. ‘Then there’s Yann Elies,’ he says. ‘In the 2008 Vendee he got washed off the front of the boat by a big wave. He grabbed a stanchion as he fell and pulled himself back on but in doing so he broke his femur, his pelvis and vertebrae in his neck.
‘He crawled back down the boat and through the hatch, just in the most unimaginable agony.
‘He was able to get to his radio and called in the emergency to his shore team but he was too immobile to get to his medical kit and painkillers, even though it was only about two metres away. He had to lie there three days, smashed up and getting tossed around, until the Australian navy came to get him. Bloody hell.
‘Thing is, they are both here, both back and ready to go racing again to win this thing. Why do we do this race? It’s an interesting question.’
THOMSON is staring out of the window of a bar in Les Sables-d’Olonne, halfway down the west coast of France. He is looking at a harbour containing 29 racing boats, including his 60ft, £3million Hugo Boss yacht, which he will sail in the Vendee Globe, the torturous solo race non-stop around the planet that starts today.
It is, by most estimations, the toughest assignment in all sports, given it spans three months of solitude and 25,000 miles of racing.
The gritty truth is that of the 138 entries across eight editions since its inception in 1989, only 65 boats have finished it, meaning more than 50 per cent of the boats that start typically do not last the course. To give it some kind of context, 225 people have been on the International Space Station and upwards of 4,000 have climbed to the top of Everest, compared to 53 different sailors who have finished the Vendee Globe.
‘They call it the Everest of the sea, but I think that sells it a bit short, personally,’ Thomson says. He is probably right.
This will be the 42-year-old’s fourth attempt to do what no British sailor has done before. Ellen MacArthur finished second in 2001, Mike Goulding took third in 2005 and Thomson did likewise last time out, in 2012. But no one from outside France has ever won; not many have endured the dramas of Thomson in trying to break that streak. This time, though, he is one of the favourites.
‘Finishing this race would be a big success, but winning it is the dream,’ he says. ‘Coming here, taking on the French, yeah, I think I can do it. But, my god, this is a hard race to win and an easy one to lose. It can be brutal, it can be all-consuming, you spend your life trying. I feel like I have certainly given it a good chunk of mine.’
Thomson’s story goes back 25 years, when at 17 he went to the Navy hospital in Gosport for a check-up. ‘My dad was a helicopter rescue pilot,’ he says. ‘I didn’t grow up like Ellen MacArthur saying I wanted to sail round the world — I wanted to be a helicopter pilot like my dad. Then one day I went to the hospital and they said my eyes were so bad I couldn’t even be a seaman in the navy.
‘Sailing was the only other thing that appealed so I went from being a hobby sailor to getting a job as an apprentice at a sailing school where I was paid £50 a week. My chief responsibilities were climbing the mast, cleaning the bilges and unblocking the toilets.’
He also worked in a factory making straws for McDonald’s. But that was then. By 25, he was the youngest skipper to win a round-the-world race after victory in the 1998 Clip- per Race, and in 2007 he set a world record for distance sailed in 24 hours. In 2012, he was third in the Vendee, contributing to his collection of podium finishes at every major solo race.
And yet a win in one of the elite events still eludes him after half a million sea miles. ‘It’s not been short on drama,’ he says. Thomson retired
from the Vendee in 2005 with a hole in his deck and in the next edition nearly lost his life three weeks before the start when a fishing boat ploughed into the side of his yacht as he slept onboard.
‘If that boat had hit a metre and a half further back it would have killed me,’ Thomson says. ‘I was asleep and suddenly the boat feels like it’s been launched against some rocks. It was horrific — we had a five-metre hole in the hull.
‘Somehow the Hugo Boss team just got on with it and got the boat patched up in time for the start and it was one of the most British things I have ever seen. I made the start and six days later I hit something in the water – race over.’
There was also the time in the 2006 Velux Five Oceans Race when Thomson’s keel was badly damaged in the dreadful conditions of the Southern Ocean.
‘I had fallen out with Mike Goulding before that race,’ Thomson says. ‘But he ended up rescuing me from a life raft in the middle of the ocean. I broke my hand when he was trying to get me from the life raft and I remember, as he dressed my hand, seeing this huge black cloud heading for us. S***.
‘Next thing you know, the wind hits, the boat leans over and his mast comes down, snapped. He is now out of the race too and we are 2,000 miles south of Africa. I thought he was going to punch me.’
He adds: ‘It is about problem solving. If I can solve all of them I might have a very good chance. Hopefully I’ll keep the drama to a minimum.’
Not biting his tongue off would be a good start.