What a Christmas for Thomas Coville: he is the fastest solitaire around the world!

Thomas Coville could not have celebrated Christmas any better. He is now the world’s fastest solo navigator. Aboard the maxi trimaran Sodebo, taking 49 days, 3 hours and 12 minutes to round the world nonstop, he literally shattered Francis Joyon’s previous record (57 days, 13 hours, 34 minutes and 6 seconds, at an average speed of 19.09 knots on the maxi trimaran Idec). Finally, on the fifth attempt (the first one was even in 2007, we had dubbed him the Wile E. Coyote of sailing), staged quietly, with no bombshell announcements in the press, everything turned out right for him! Great!!!

HOW HE SHATTERED THE WORLD RECORD
Compared to Joyon in 2007, Coville faced a very different Atlantic crossing: immediately after the start he kept low, rounding Coruna, passing through the Canary Islands and Cape Verde (Joyon had jumped into the middle of the Atlantic), to Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. From here, again, he kept further south of Joyon to the Cape of Good Hope. A choice that paid off, in fact Coville lapped the leader with about 500 miles to spare over IDEC’s projection. In the Indian, however, it was further north to the Kerguelen Islands, after which it moved to lower latitudes than Joyon. Again, an apt choice, his lead ahead of Cape Leeuwin amounted to 1,140 miles. In the Pacific, the two routes were fairly similar, but Sodebo benefited from better weather conditions and came into Cape Horn with an impressive 1,800 miles ahead.

He then decided to leave the Malvinas/Falkland Islands to starboard (Joyon left them to port) and is now sailing up off Rio de Janeiro with a lead of more than 1,500 miles, in “control.” The ascent into the Atlantic was a breeze, in more than favorable wind conditions. In fact, Coville managed to gain another 1,500 miles. A bombshell

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Let’s find out who Thomas Coville one of the world’s greatest (and most secretive) sailors is, thanks to the interview our Fabio Pozzo conducted with him right after he won the 2011/12 Volvo Ocean Race.

The remorse of offering Thomas Coville, fresh off the Volvo Ocean Race and the winning Groupama 4, an unlikely garlic-oil-pepperoni pasta at an equally unlikely Italian restaurant on Quay Street in Galway, Western Ireland, haunts me. After what he ate on board…. “I lost 12 kilos during this world tour. On board eating is a discipline: you have to do it” he told me, just to add to the burden on my conscience.

The Legendary is a 44-year-old man. Smiling, calm, deep. They call him the “philosopher of sailing,” there must be a reason. Thomas was born in Rennes, up there where France is soon Finis terrae. He began sailing as a boy rather than a child. First cruising with family members on a Pen Duick 600, then the Laser school at Plèrin, a club in the Cotes-d’Armor to which he still subscribes. “I was not a colossus; I developed late. In other sports, especially team sports, I was doing poorly.“. He gets the hang of it. In 1985 he skippers Polytechnique in the Tour de France à la voile, on which he remains until ’91. Then come the Admiral’s Cup, the America’s Cup, the Sidney-Hobart, the Half Ton Cup, etc. Meanwhile, he graduates in Computer Science and is hired by the Bolloré-Dalmas company to open new agencies in the Pacific.

During those years he became a professional navigator, but the real turning point, the one in the direction of the course au large, came in ’97, when Thomas finished second in the Mini Transat and embarked on his first Jules Verne Trophy with Olivier de Kersauson’s Sport Elec. He went down, won the Routhe du Rhum with the monohull Aquitaine Innovations, finished 11th in the Solitaire du Figaro. In ’99 he also won the Transat Jacques Vabre on Sodeb’O with Hervé Janen. In 2001 he was sixth in the Vendée Globe and participated in the Auckland-Rio leg of the Volvo Ocean Race on D Juice. Until, in 2002, he was thunderstruck by trimarans: he built an 18, 28-meter one, wore the colors of the Sodebo Industrial Group, and began his record-breaking season.

The long journey to the Volvo
The man I met, in Galway, thus has on his shoulders a Vendée Globe, three attempts at the fastest solo round-the-world race (2007/2008 abandoned, 2008/2009 and 2011), two participations in the Jules Verne, the last of which was victorious in 2010 with Frank Cammas’ Groupama 3 (48 days, 7 hours), and the just-completed Volvo Ocean Race with Groupama 4.

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An awe-inspiring palmarès. So, we started talking about Frank Cammas, the Leader. “He extended a hand to me after the flop of my last record attempt“. Flop, in short…Thomas pushed his new trimaran, a 32-meter giant always christened Sodeb’O, to 61 days 5 minutes getting just a whisker closer to Francis Joyon’s record of 57 days 13 hours and 34 minutes. “Frank wanted to form a new team, consisting not only of Volvo specialists, but sailors who also came from ocean racing with multihulls. And I was interested in this regatta both technically and psychologically: I wanted to understand what it might mean to fit into a closed cell of eleven men cramped into ten square meters and aimed at a single, common goal“.

The heart and the mind
Here, sailing as introspection. “Eleven men compressed into a small space, not sleeping, not washing, eating poorly. I think it is the most extreme test one can endure“. Thomas had a specific role on board: that of, in addition to chief guard and deputy to Cammas, a mediator. “Frank has a very scientific approach to sailing. First and foremost, it has a maniacal attention to detail, which knows no ranking: everything counts. He demanded, for example, a small number of sleeping bags, requiring us to use them in rotation to save weight. We are talking about grams! He is like this. He checks everything, sleeps very little. And he is a leader. He asks your opinion, but then he decides, taking responsibility for it“.

Yes, there is no democracy, on Cammas boats. “There cannot be on a Volvo 70. On board, the group always prevails, the common goal and the solution for the group comes from the leader“. Speaking of the key moments of the race, it was Cammas who decided at the start to bring himself all the way under Morocco, a move that stunned his opponents.

“”It wasa sign of our diversity.” He who decided to take refuge in Punta del Este, Uruguay, after the dismasting to repair the breakdown. He who drove Coville himself into a crisis. “It happened when Franck decided to pass inside the Bahamas, on his way to Miami, instead of keeping out as Telefònica had done. He decided this course on his own, without consulting us. For me it was the hardest moment: I could no longer dialogue. I had another idea, and yet I was forced to sketch, to swallow my ego. During this leg and the next leg, from Miami to Lisbon, I was lonely, I was sick. The heart was no longer at one with the head“.

Eleven men in ten square meters
I thought again about his role as a mediator. How do you mediate with yourself. How do you come out, in cases like this? “Always with the heart. Whereas for Franck it is the mind that must prevail. this is, perhaps, the real complexity of modern sailing: bringing together the technical aspect with the mental aspect and the heart“. Shipboard reports are at the heart of Planet Coville. “You are in a cage, the boat being pushed at 30 knots, the pounding of the waves rumbling in your ears and making you regret the silence that becomes an unfulfillable desire. You are crushed by group pressure. There are all the conditions for a war to break out….“.

They came close more than once on Groupama 4. “At least two or three. That’s where I would come in, listening to the reasons of my comrades and explaining to them that there was no alternative, that there was only one solution: go ahead“. Cammas left Thomas with this task. “He does not admit the human crisis. He never goes into crisis because he is very determined. He feels it is unprofessional and does not understand how anyone could leave room for human factors during a performance like that. Franck tells you you’re wrong, and that’s it. He is very tranchant“.

Coville was also instrumental on Groupama 4 in “pulling the strings” of the crew. “On boats like these the crew is like a chamber music ensemble in which at some point each person must realize that his or her time has come to do something for the group. My job was to understand each person’s differences and bring them to the highest value so that they could express themselves to the fullest when the time was right. Brad Marsh, for example, may not have been as well prepared initially, but he grew and was ready when it came to playing his solo. It was in the penultimate stage. We were approaching Lorient, it was gale force, 30 knots of wind, we launched at 25 and we had a mast problem. We were in danger of throwing it all away overnight because of a fouled halyard. Brad went up the masthead three times and won us the regatta“.

I kept asking about group pressure. “It is deadly; it is stronger than the sea and the wind. I sail to escape the pressure of the world, and the absurd thing is that on board I find myself in the same yoke, that same pressure is renewed, more or less the same patterns are reproduced. With one key difference, however: on board, the group is striving for a single goal, there is a common motivation that is stronger than everything, than you. On the ground this is impossible“.

“Hi dad I’m Jane, bravo for the victory, you are my champion. I love you.” “There, you see, I won the Volvo because of that.”

All right the pressure, the danger then? You are on a bolide launched at full speed over the waves…. “It is so dangerous to race trimarans that everything else seems to me to be less so. However, even on a Volvo 70 you feel mentally endangered all the time. But the biggest fear, I repeat, in my case was that I would no longer be able to handle the pressure of the group. And that involves a lot of work: you have to be focused all the time, you can never give up“.

The regatta is won if you grow
Thomas also told me about the growth of the crew, the strength, along with the plurality and diversity, on which he said Groupama 4 has focused. “At the start in Alicante we were definitely the best team with the best boat, but nevertheless our goal was to grow. And we were able to do that, under the push of Cammas. Team Tèlefonica, which was the leader in the first part of the race, I think at some point was no longer able to improve. And it screwed on itself. Yes, I really think the best thing about this adventure has been our growth spiral. Besides, the Volvo Ocean Race is a race that gives you time to evolve and enjoy this growth“. Yeah, the weather. A very long race, 39,000 miles, nine months. All different than the records. “Time in the Volvo is your ally; in records it is your enemy. It never stops. No, better to run against opponents“.

Between future plans and a text message
At this point, I got hooked. He is the “philosopher of sailing,” no? A Marzullian question: is it history, in this case the regatta, that makes men, or vice versa? “I couldn’t say. Perhaps nature is the element, the factor that can make history and that can put men on the altar or destroy them“.

On board, the group is striving for a single goal, there is a common motivation that is stronger than everything, than you. On the ground this is impossible

We continued to chat. He was very relaxed. He was waiting for his wife, he gave me more time. I asked him about the books that they say, he brings to the regatta. “Ten years ago, at Vendée, it was Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism.” “This time “Atlantica,” which is a collection of poems by Kennet White, and Henri Laborit’s “Praise of Escape.” But I couldn’t read them, I would have taken too much time away from sleep“. Thomas told me more about his chocolate indigestion, about a honey crèpe that delighted him, about his knee strain on the stage from Auckland to Brazil (“I put on an adhesive brace, but it didn’t seem as bad as it later appeared on the ground”).

I asked him if he will do the next Volvo again (“I don’t think so, I’m too old“), and if Cammas will do it (“I think he’s aiming for the Olympics, like his friend Iker Martinez“). Until we got to talking about winning. “For Franck it is the most beautiful moment. For me? Is excitement, happiness, the spirit to move forward“. At this point Thomas the Legendary took out his cell phone, searched for a text message, and let me read it. “Hi dad, it’s Jane (his 12-year-old daughter; he also has a 7-year-old, ed.). Bravo for the win, you are my champion. I love you. I’m Jane, your pearl.” “There, you see, I won the Volvo because of that,” he said, looking me in the eye. We were moved together.