Vendée Globe: who is Le Turquais, the first of the no foils who is doing better than Le Cam

The feat of Charlie Dalin in the Indian Ocean., who with his Macif stayed for 48 hours in front of a depression with winds over 50 knots by going on a solo getaway, should not, however, make us forget that behind him the Vendée Globe tells many other stories in this crazy race around the world. We are particularly struck by one among many, that of Tanguy Le Turquais, 35, skipper of the Imoca 60 Lazare, a 2007 Finot-Conq design boat, currently the first, or at least always among the first, of the foil-less boats in the fleet, in 18th position. Tanguy races on one of the oldest boats in the entire fleet, only 3 Imoca in fact have a year of launching before 2007.

The race is still long and we will see whether or not the Frenchman will be able to hold the position, but at the moment there are also a number of foilers behind him, including Giancarlo Pedote’s Prysmian, and a head-to-head against Jean Le Cam is looming in the rankings . Le Turquais’ boat is a good, old-generation Imoca, the same one with which Damien Seguin finished seventh in the 2020 Vendée, but it is still an old-fashioned design, carried on a fairly limited budget. Nothing in short to do with the new Imoca 60 of the media-savvy Jean Le Cam. Le Turquais is the husband of Clarisse Cremer, also involved in this Vendée Globe but higher up in the current rankings, a sailor with a lot of Figaro behind him and an excellent career that began in the Mini 650s with which he achieved a third place in the Mini Transat and numerous podiums. We could define him as perhaps an inconspicuous character, but very effective on the water: his course so far has had very few blunders, always in phase, with an excellent passage from Good Hope where, thanks to a more southerly position, he managed to overtake a small group of boats positioned to the north, including also “Le Roi” Jean Le Cam. In a hypothetical comparison between Le Cam and Le Turquais, we could say without a shadow of a doubt that, considering the budgets and the fact that Le Cam races an Imoca 60 dinghy from 2023, the best performance is clearly that of the 35-year-old, so far one of the surprises of this Vendée. A young, prepared skipper, perhaps somewhat overshadowed by colleagues with more prestigious sponsors and also by his wife Clarisse Cremer herself, who certainly is another character who “pierces” the screen a lot.

Vendée Globe – Is the King Naked?

We launch a provocation. Perhaps one of the great disappointments of this Vendée Globe, however, is Jean Le Cam. In 2020, after an excellently conducted round-the-world race where he in fact at least managed to stay up to the finish line fairly close in the wake of the foilers, he unfiltered his skepticism toward “flying” boats, claiming that a newly designed drift Imoca could hold its own against the latest generation of foilers. Said, done, in 2023 he launched his new boat on a Raison design, without foils and with a hull updated to the latest hydrodynamic studies. The result, however, is hugely far from expectations, as he is just 100 miles ahead of his old boat, now skippered by the very tough Violette Dorange, and behind the excellent Le Turquais. In the Atlantic, his eastern course proved disastrous, opening the chasm of miles that now sees him in the last group of the race, but nevertheless worth a few headlines in those days. We’ll see if The King, a nickname he has carried with him since his last victory, the 1996 Solitarie du Figaro (in the Barcelona World Race and Jacques Vabre successes he was listed as co-skipper with Bernard Stamm and Vincent Riou), will be able to fight back in the Big South and set things right.

The Vendée Globe Trial