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Welsh solo round the world sailor and family man Alex Thomson has an obsession: to be the first non-Frenchman to win the Vendee Globe solo round the world race on his newest Hugo Boss boat. His wife, Kate has given him permission too…
The challenge
The idea behind the Vendee Globe round the world race may sound simple: sail your boat around the world via the Cape of Good Hope, south of Australia and New Zealand and then turn left past Cape Horn and blast up the Atlantic back for tea and medals.
The reality, though, is very different. Although many sailors try to prepare as much as they can for the event, by working with professional skippers and chartering boats on regular occasions from yacht charter Greece to practice, only a few are able to sail back for tea at the Atlantic. on average just half of the boats that leave the Breton town of Les Sables d’Olonne every four years actually make it home. Only around 200 ever have managed the feat of sailing around the world non-stop, as against 4,000 or so who have summited Everest.
Some retire but others sink in dramatic circumstances. Alex himself had to be rescued by a fellow skipper deep in the Southern Ocean when his boat sank in a 2006-07 solo race, and limping to Africa his rescue boat’s mast broke!
Alex has had serious breakages in the last six years, breaking both the boats he’s had built for the 2016-17 and now the 2020-21 race. In 2015 his boat hit an unidentified floating object just miles from the start of a qualifying race for the 2016 Vendee Globe and it had to be rebuilt for the race.
In the 2016 Vendee Globe, he broke a hydrofoil after hitting another object yet managed to come in just 16 hours behind the eventual race winner, Frenchman Armel Le Clea’ch who overtook the Welshman several thousand miles before.
In 2019? You guessed hit, Alex hit another unidentified floating object in a qualifying race for the coming Vendee Globe and had to abandon ship! At the time of writing the boat is being repaired with the Alex Thomson Racing website declaring, “We expect to be sailing again by March 2020, at which point we will move straight into a testing and development period.”
Strong family foundations
Speaking to Blue Marble the solo yacht racer said that the toughest thing about racing around the world is being away from his family: “It’s tougher for them than it is for me and I have to remind myself that it is my decision to do this. I can speak to them every day, as communication is more advanced than it used to be, but ultimately I am still out there on my own. When you reach Point Nemo in the Pacific Ocean you’re in the most remote part of the world so being rescued is not really a possibility unless it’s by another skipper. That level of isolation can be tough.”
When the exhausted, almost broken skipper finished the race in January 2017 you could see the emotion in his face as he held his then two-year-old son for the first time. Though he only rarely speaks of his family life in the media (no celebrity outings beyond the call of duty for him) you can see that this provides a strong foundation for a man who has to dig deep into personal reserves to achieve this almost astonishing feat.
The UK newspaper The Daily Mail reported in 2017 Kate, his wife had given him permission to do another campaign. This is quite telling. Though again largely unreported, Kate has to carry quite a burden during these campaigns by looking after the children and running the household while herself hoping her companion will return in one piece from his oceanic races. If he always came home in glory that wouldn’t be such a problem for her, but given his reputation of being a boat breaker this is not the case every time!
Alex has always had a good family life. His father was a search and rescue helicopter pilot in Wales, something the future sailor would attempt to follow but his eyesight prevented him. Time and again in the media, Thomson talks of his summer holidays spent on a tidal rock off the Channel Island of Jersey.
Ahead of the 2016 Vendee Globe race, he told the Guardian newspaper, on the Les Ecréhous islands, “It was a massive playground for me as a kid. The adults slept in the hut and we children would camp on the patio. It’s one of my fondest memories.”
The sea in his blood
On finding his eyesight was too poor to follow in his father’s footsteps, so Alex followed his passion firstly for windsurfing and then sailing. After being invited on an expedition to Greenland by the first man to win a solo round the world race, Robin Knox Johnston, Knox Johnston have Alex the opportunity to become the youngest ever round the world race skipper at just 25 years old on the Clipper Round the World Race.
This launched the Welshman onto an unorthodox route into the annals of history as the most successful non-French solo round the world yachtsman. He now holds a second and a third-place finish on the race, and if all goes well is going to be a serious contender to become the first foreigner to win the race in this edition.
Can he do it? Given he himself has only finished two of the three Vendee Globes he has raced and had several serious accidents along the way, one can only hope. That said, the man is considered one of the most serious contenders for the 2020-21 race and should the sea god Neptune decide he can finish it there is every chance he could take the trophy.
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