Pedote, the “king of France,” prepares for Route du Rhum

The French respect us, who’s balls are still spinning… “Bartali” by Paolo Conte once again fits the bill. Giancarlo Pedote (above, pictured by G. Grange) recently won Les Sables-Azores-Les Sables, the most important 2,540-mile race on the 2014 Mini 6.50 calendar. To keep with the “cycling” theme, the victory of the first stage of the race (from Les Sables d’Olonne, in the Vendée, to Horta, in the Azores) came just as Vincenzo Nibali was taking home the Tour de France.

WIN IN THE WOLF’S DEN
Winning in the home of our cousins is always a great satisfaction, especially in disciplines that have always been their strongholds, as ocean sailing has always been: the transalpines themselves recognized his value by awarding him the title of French Offshore Champion in 2013. The Florentine sailor (class of 1975) is making a great habit of it: aboard Prysmian (photo below), David Raison’s former “Teamwork” (the proto with the round bow), he has racked up an incredible string of victories. Five regattas, five first places: Lorient-Bretagne Sud Mini, Pornichet Sélect, Mini en Mai 2014, Trophée Marie-Agnès Péron and now the Les Sables.

NOW LA ROUTE DU RHUM
Giancarlo soon recovered from the disappointment of the 2013 Mini Transat, which ended in second place after losing the lead with 300 miles to go (over a course of 3,700!) due to a broken bowsprit. And now off he goes, on the Class 40 Fantastica made available to him by “philanthropic” owner Lanfranco Cirillo, to seek the feat at the tenth Route du Rhum (3,543 miles solo from Saint Malo to Point-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe). The other “paisà” who will take part in the regatta are Andrea Mura, on the Open 50 Vento di Sardegna, and Alessandro Di Benedetto, on the Imoca Team Plastique. For Giancarlo this will be a real test of maturity, in view of his more than likely participation in the Vendée Globe on an Imoca 60. How nice it would be to have other Italians on the solo round-the-world race, besides the aforementioned Di Benedetto: and beware, because Pedote may not be the only one…

GIANCARLO’S STORY (FROM THE FEBRUARY 2014 SAILING NEWSPAPER)
You cross the finish line of one of the toughest editions of the Mini Transat in second place. Never had any Italian done as well as you. You should be celebrating, but you’re not. In fact, you have the carrion inside because you, in this Mini, had participated to win and made no secret of it. No bubbly, just a big pissed off because your name is. Giancarlo Pedote and you are someone who, when he embarks on a venture, demands the best of himself: and if your bowsprit breaks with 300 miles to go (out of a 3,700-mile race), allowing the Frenchman Benoît Marie to snatch victory from you, you can’t get over it. We have introduced you in a few lines to the strength of Giancarlo Pedote, the loner who made us dream until the last at the Mini Transat: he is someone who does not know what it means to “rest on his laurels.”

COMPETITIVE SAILING, WHO WAS SHE?

Pedote was born in Florence in 1975 to parents who were civil servants and could not afford to enroll their child in a sailing school. However, Giancarlo likes the sea, very much: “My history with the sea,” he says, “began as a child. One of the first experiences I remember was retrieving a bottle that my father dropped on the bottom of the sea; I was about 6 years old. But I had to wait until I was 12 years old to get close to sailing: my father bought a heavy sailboard with a wooden daggerboard that was not retractable and had a large triangular sail. I remember ruining my arms pulling it up and down.” At 16 years old, Pedote is a good self-taught windsurfer who, while not a member of any club, enjoys off the coast of Follonica pulling edges along with his “popular” sailing friends.

Meanwhile, the 1990s arrived, the Moro di Venezia made Italians dream, and the passion for offshore sailing exploded in the Boot: it was an all-too-solid economic period and charter schools proliferated: Giancarlo’s cousin, Piero, worked for one of them and often had to make transfers: “My cousin proposed that I accompany him on a transfer of a cabin cruiser from Greece to Italy. I can say that was my first contact with long sailing: it happened very late, since we were in 1998!” In the meantime, Pedote became a windsurfing instructor, a profession he does part-time to pay for his university studies (he will graduate with a degree in philosophy in 2001), and took his first steps into the world of dinghies, on Hobie Cat 16s. but the voyage together with Piero changed his conception of sailing: “I was struck by how many things you had to know how to do on board: you didn’t just have to take care of carrying the boat, but check the engine, put yourself at the chart table, use a tester correctly, know every single part of the boat to deal with emergencies. I realized that it wasn’t enough to be a good sailor, you needed a good amount of seamanship. I learned how to take apart inboard and outboard engines: since I had never owned a moped to ‘rig’ in my youth it was on a boat that I completed my ‘field apprenticeship’ as a mechanic.”

WRITER TO MAKE HIMSELF KNOWN
Pedote leaves teaching sailboarding to devote himself to small cabin cruisers: he participates in many winter championships aboard the boats of friends and acquaintances, like a normal enthusiast. He then became an instructor at the “La Via del Mare” cooperative in Florence, Italy.: “In my veins flowed the blood of a sportsman, I had practiced boxing and kickboxing competitively in my youth: now I wanted to challenge myself as an offshore sailor. I took part in my first Giro d’Italia sailing race (he would complete four, ed.) and in the Transat des Alizés, where aboard an Open 60, paired with Margherita Pelaschier, I completed the Atlantic crossing from Portugal to Saint Barth, finishing in second place. In 2001 I had also had the good fortune to prepare an Open 50 for the Jacques Vabre, acquiring skills in the field of tuning an oceanic boat.” Giancarlo decides to put all these experiences to use in an ultratechnical book, “The Skipper’s Handbook.”, which he published for Mursia in 2004: “I was already dreaming of the Mini Transat back then, I tried a self-sponsored campaign in 2003, participating in the Rome for Two with my cousin Piero in a rented Mini, but it did not go very well. I decided that if I started with a sports project, I would only do it with the certainty of being competitive. I wrote the book with the intention of making myself known in the sailing world, to raise sponsors who could support me.” Not surprisingly, the book’s opening dedication reads, “To the first boat that will give me the Ocean solo. Sponsor urgently sought.”. Between 2005 and 2007 Pedote freed himself from teaching and entered the world of professional sailing, serving as tailer and bowman on monotypes (such as Swan 45 and Mumm 30), Maxi and IRC.

THE CHOICE OF LIFE
In 2007 Giancarlo found a reliable sponsor in Prysmian: “I was faced with the choice of a lifetime: I knew what to do. I emptied my bank account, got into debt, and bought my first 650 in Spain., the Pogo 2 626, which I took to Punta Ala. At the time I was sharing a house in the Sienese hills with a friend of mine. From one day to the next I told him, ‘Bye, I’m going,’ angering him not a little. I would participate in the 2009 Transat: in Punta Ala, where I was sleeping aboard a Sun Fast 37 provided by Via del Mare during the preparation stages of the boat, I met Matteo Severi, who would become my assistant. I did very little training, given my obsession with boat preparation. I didn’t trust anyone: before participating in the San Remo Mini Solo for example I decided to hull myself on the eve of the race: I took the tanks at a dive center near a parking lot. They had been refilled with contaminated air from car exhausts. I felt faint, started off feeling terrible, and at the first buoy I found myself in sixth place: I had a coffee, inhaled deeply, and my ‘hangover’ passed. I started pulling like crazy and won the regatta. I realized that anything was possible.” In fact, in 2009 Pedote moved to Loriént, Brittany, met his wife Stefania, and at the Mini Transat finished fourth among the Serie, best result ever achieved by an Italian: “Too bad for my friend Riccardo Apolloni, with whom I had prepared the Transat, who was beached a few miles from the finish: he was third.”

THE HERO OF THE MINI TRANSAT

Filed the Transat Pedote sells 626: the desire to get back into the game is great but the wallet is crying, so he opts for a two-year stint on the Figaro, where he doesn’t shine but doesn’t disfigure either. In January 2012 came the decision to buy David Raison’s Teamwork 747, winner of the 2011 Mini Transat, the famous Proto with the round bow: “A very demanding boat that needs to be tuned to perfection. I put two years of hard work into it, especially for carrying gaits.” Work well paid off: in 2013, Giancarlo won the Trinité-Plymouth, the Trophée Marie-Agnès Peron and was second at the Demi-Cle and Pornichet Select. Cards in hand, he is the strongest: an Italian at the top of the international ranking. “I left for the Mini that I was a lion, I felt strong, and my son had just been born. I had my first stage cancelled when I was four miles from the finish. I was angry but even more charged. When, while leading 300 miles from Guadeloupe during the single leg, after a strake I broke the bowsprit, I repaired it in three hours but the big spi was not efficient because I had to shorten the bowsprit. So Marie took the victory. So goes the sail, but what rotten blood“. Now Giancarlo, the best Italian minnow ever, is waiting to sell his Prysmian 747, which is coveted by many: first he has to figure out if his plan to participate in the Vendée Globe on an Imoca 60, supported by Prysmian and other sponsors, will come to life. His determination will serve him well.