The Vendée Globe 2020 is played in a pocket square (photo illustration).
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JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER / AFP
The winner of the Vendée Globe will be known in the coming hours
He will be a week behind Armel Le Cléac'h's record
The foilers have certainly disappointed, but the weather remains the main fault
Never seen.
A few hours from the end of the Vendée Globe 2020-21, five boats can still claim victory in this unprecedented group finish.
Better (or worse), the one who arrives at Les Sables d'Olonne first will not necessarily be declared the winner because of the famous compensations.
The scenario is enough to make angry routing and calculations of all kinds barge whose conclusions are united on one point: whoever the winner, the differences will be tiny.
“What we saw on the water throughout the event, it's crazy.
This race was extraordinary ”, smiles the team manager of Thomas Rettant (LinkedOut), Marcus Hutchinson.
In the first sense of the word.
This edition of the Vendée Globe is unlike any other in large part because of the capricious weather never inclined to let the leaders of the fleet take flight.
The foilers remained stuck, the old mounts like those of Le Cam took advantage and, for the first time since Alain Gautier's victory in the second edition, the winner will not break the record of the previous winner, here Armel Le Cléac'h.
Chance and weather
Bankruptcy of the foilers, victory for projects on a human scale, global warming… All the hypotheses have been more or less mentioned to explain this improbable scenario never seen in 30 years of racing.
Jean-Yves Bernot, weather specialist in ocean racing, sweeps them all away with the back of his hand.
“If we start the Vendée Globe 15 days later, we don't have the same race at all, because the systems are no longer the same.
They would have chained themselves a little better, gaps would have formed.
"On the one hand, the fleet would have avoided a tropical storm which was already quite rare in itself, on the other hand, we would also have seen more classic patterns emerge where the fastest boats would have sailed in the trade winds of the southern hemisphere. before taking advantage of the first gales of the southern seas to take off after Bonne-Espérance.
“It's a race where the rich usually get richer,” illustrates the double winner Michel Desjoyeaux.
When you are ahead, when you have a faster boat, you take the lead, make good decisions and you extricate yourself.
“It was once believed that this is what would happen for Rouillard and Dalin after a very lenient Doldrums (the only positive point of this world tour).
Hutchinson: “on the descent of the Atlantic, we had trade winds for two days and in the South Atlantic, Thomas even took the lead.
He was widening the gap, but the head of the fleet was finally blocked ”.
The game of little horses
To put it simply, the southern part of the southern hemisphere has been a big problem.
The southern summer was good for the penguins, less for the skippers.
To make things complicated, we have to refer to Bernot.
“The anticyclones in the southern oceans were very far south.
It means that the boats had to go further south to get wind.
But the ice exclusion zone blocked their way and so they ran a lot in transition zones.
"
Thomas Rouillard did try to go to the North to see what was going on there, in vain.
He made up his mind to wait for the softies to come and pick them up, him, Dalin and Bestaven.
“It's like when you play little horses.
You attacked and bang, you come back to the starting point.
The peak of this pattern was when Bestaven was 450 miles ahead off Brazil.
We say to ourselves that it is won.
And then finally… Okay, he made a small strategic mistake, but he lost the equivalent of a day of sailing.
All of this is very much linked to the weather in the south.
"To demonstrate the influence of the weather on the pace of a fleet whose winner will take a week in the snitch by the ghost of Armel Le Cléac'h," MichDesj "notes that the improved version of his winning boat in 2008 (in 84 days), now in the hands of Jean Le Cam, will not do much better than 13 years ago.
Night installation of the second foil on Arkéa-Paprec - Arkéa-Paprec
The foilers not questioned but ...
If the major implication of this confusing weather in the grotesque scenario of this Vendée is hardly in doubt, it does not prevent the drawing of first conclusions on the new generation foilers, without however falling into the alarmism which would lead to a back to the drift boats.
Antoine Mermod, president of the Imoca class.
“When we design boats, we do statistics.
Over 15 years, we take a Vendée Globe start 10 days before and after the official start, which makes us the equivalent of 300 Vendée Globe models.
And we virtually race candidate boats to see which ones perform better.
This weather configuration with all the doors closing is very unlikely to happen and therefore to recur.
Either we build a boat that will statistically be ahead more often, or we build a boat that will win less often but will be better in certain areas [like drift boats this year].
It's difficult to think that we're going to do this boat for a weather that has a 4% chance of arriving.
If we see a foiler go 20% faster than a drift boat, I don't see a skipper going back to a previous model.
"
However, the premature breakage of the big favorite Jérémie Beyou after three days of racing aboard the latest generation foiler that was said to be better prepared, as well as the failure of Sébastien Simon's immense foils on Arkéa-Paprec. , made you think.
The Imoca voted against the headlong rush for progress and refuses to adopt the promising plans that would allow the foilers to switch to “final” flying mode.
Now is the time for optimization, because, concludes Desjoyeaux, “in the current configuration, we have seen that the foilers have a significant performance gain in a wind window that is much more limited than we imagined.
It will therefore be necessary to work on the foils but also the structure of the boats.
But let's not forget either that the two boats that did most of the way in the lead were foilers.
If we had had the same weather as four years ago, the winner would have taken Le Cléac'h's record two days and maybe we wouldn't even talk about it today.
"
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