2012. Thomas Coville, the man who passed Cape Horn eight times.

Welcome to the special section “GdV 5th Years.” We are introducing you, day by day, An article from the archives of the Journal of Sailing, starting in 1975. A word of advice, get in the habit of starting your day with the most exciting sailing stories-it will be like being on a boat even if you are ashore.

Thomas Coville, the philosopher

Taken from the 2012 Journal of Sailing, Year 38, No. 10, November, pp. 78-85.

He circumnavigated the globe seven times and passed Cape Horn eight times, broke the world speed record. His name is Thomas Coville, reserved to the point of shyness, one of the greatest sailors in history. Fabio Pozzo tells his incredible story.

leggi anche

2022. The second time of Vespucci’s impossible feat

Who is the man who has gone seven times around the world. Thomas Coville was born on May 10, 1964, in Rennes, France. Little inclined for classic team sports, he took up sailing after classic family cruising, then started on the classic Lasers. His love for the sea soon became all-consuming, until he reached the America’s Cup in the mid-1990s. But that’s when the thunderbolt for the Ocean struck, first together with that great master Olivier De Kersauson aboard Sport Elec, then on Aquitaine Innovations with Yves Parlier. The time to play solo soon came (it’s 1999), thanks to sponsor Sodebo and his first 60-foot monohull. Sixth at the 2000 Vendée Globe, in 2002 here was the big leap into the world of multihulls, with his 18-foot trimaran, with which he managed to win the 24-hour solo distance record (628 miles at an average of 26.2 knots). Last year he missed the record for the nonstop solo round-the-world race by a whisker.

The remorse of offering Thomas Coville, fresh off the Volvo Ocean Race and the winning Groupama 4, an unlikely garlic-oil-peperoncino pasta at an equally unlikely Italian restaurant on Quay Street in Galway, Western Ireland, haunts me. After what he ate on board, he says. “I’ve lost 12 pounds during this round-the-world trip. On board eating is a discipline: you have to do it,” he told me, just to compound 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. The first cruise 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 is skipper of Polytechnique in the Tour de France à la voile, on which he remains until ’91. Then come theAdmiral’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: seven circumnavigations of the globe, eight Cape Horn passages. 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 race from both a technical and a psychological point of view: 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 badly. I think it is the most extreme ordeal one can endure.” Thomas had a specific role on board: that of, in addition to being chief guard and deputy to Cammas, a mediator. “Frank has a very scientific approach to sailing. First and foremost, he has a maniacal attention to detail, which knows no ranking: everything counts. He demanded, for example, a reduced number of sleeping bags, requiring us to use them in rotation, to save on weight. We are talking about grams! He is like that. He controls 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 can’t 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 surprised his opponents. “It was a signal of our diversity.” He who decided to take refuge in Punta del Este, Uruguay, after dismasting to repair the failure. 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 Telefonica had done. He decided this route on his own, without consulting us. For me that was the hardest moment: I could no longer dialogue. I had another idea and yet I was forced to sketch it out, to swallow my ego. During this stage and the next one, from Miami to Lisbon, I was lonely, I was sick. The heart was no longer 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 it, perhaps, the real complexity of modern sailing: bringing the technical aspect together with the mental aspect and the heart.” Onboard relationships are at the heart of planet Coville. “You’re 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 the pressure of the group. 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: move on.” Cammas left this task to Thomas. “He does not admit human crisis. He never goes into crisis, because he is very determined. He thinks it’s unprofessional, and he doesn’t understand how anyone can 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 has also been instrumental on Groupama 4 in “pulling the strings” of the crew. “On boats like these the crew is like a chamber music ensemble where at some point each person has to 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 best prepared initially, but he was able to grow and was ready when it came to playing his solo. It was on 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 race.”. I kept asking about the pressure of the group. “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 fundamental difference, though: on board the group is striving for a single goal, there is a common motivation that is stronger than everything, than you. On land this is impossible.” All right the pressure, the danger then? You are on a bolide launched at full speed over the waves…. “It’s so dangerous to race trimarans that everything else I feel is less so. However, even on a Volvo 70 you feel mentally always in danger. But the biggest fear, I repeat, in my case was not being able to handle the pressure of the group anymore. And that involves a huge amount of work: you have to be focused all the time, you can never give up.”

leggi anche

BS Nautic, a team of professionals at your disposal

The regatta is won if you grow

Thomas also told me about the growth of the crew, the strong point, along with the plurality and diversity, on which he said Groupama 4 centered. “At the start in Alicante we were definitely the best team with the best boat, but nevertheless our goal was to grow. And we managed to do that, under the push of Cammas. Team Telefonica, which was the leader in the first part of the race, I think at some point was no longer able to improve. And it spun 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 that growth.” Yep, time. A very long race, 39,000 miles, nine months. All different than the records. “Time in Volvo is your ally, in records it is your enemy. It never stops. No, better to race 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. Maybe nature is the element, the factor that can make history and that can put men on the altar or destroy them.” 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 you say, you take to regattas. Ten years ago, at the Vendée, it was “Existentialism is a Humanism” by Sartre. “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 stolen too much time from my 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 best moment. For me? It is excitement, happiness, the spirit to go on.” 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 into my eyes. We were moved together.

by Fabio Pozzo

• Check out all the articles from the GdV archive in this section