Route du Rhum – Destination Guadeloupe, departure on 6 November
What prompted this life change?
I studied, I became a journalist, sailing with my family as a teenager, then racing, always with my family. When I was a student my father lent me his boat and I found my first sponsor to buy me sails and put together teams of friends to shop here and there. Let’s say my sailing projects have only increased in power along with a fairly classic earthly life. As a reporter at Le Figaro, I said to myself, “Hey, why don’t you do the Solitaire du Figaro? It was a nice wink, so I went there and took a good hit but I thought it was great. I arrived, I realized that I was not a good sailor, I was a good sailor because with a breeze I had reached an honorable ranking. It made me want to do the 2010 Route du Rhum in Class 40. At first I had promised my wife that it would be my one and only ocean liner, which was the dream of a lifetime. During the transaction I found it super hard but I wanted to go through with it: I said to myself “never again”. Before the finish line, the sun rises on Guadeloupe and I was taken by such an emotion, everything made sense: so much suffering but these seconds of eternity … I said to myself: “this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. It was a founding moment. I returned to the Route du Rhum in 2014, still in Class40, with a great result (9th out of 45), and there I decided to undertake a great challenge, the challenge of my life, the Vendée Globe. So I introduced myself at the beginning of the Vendée Globe 2016.
Married, three children, an apartment in Levallois: how do you manage this radical change?
This happened gradually because, at first, I was on unpaid leave to start a business: I left Le Figaro for two years to prepare for the Vendée Globe and then came back. For years I have been going back and forth between Paris and Brittany: in La Trinité I lived with Yvon Berrehar, my team manager, or in a hotel depending on the week. My physical preparation was done in Levallois, project management and communication also in Levallois and everything else in Brittany. Since my wife has a fairly demanding job, I sometimes made the return trip twice a week: she had constraints that forced me to return on Wednesday after two days of sailing on Monday and Tuesday. I left on Thursday morning to go sailing. From that time I keep the memory of a certain effervescence and a certain vortex but I have lived incredible moments.
Does being a Po Science graduate and a HEC master’s degree help attract sponsors?
It is obvious that it helps to have a common language with the people who have responsibilities in companies: it helps to sell oneself, to find ideas, to stand out from others, to see one’s sports project a bit like product marketing. You must be able to tell a story, find a storytelling, a positioning and communication axes. We can clearly see that Clarisse Crémer, who graduated from HEC, is doing very well in this area. Having studied helps when you are a sailor. And then I believe that today it is also the job of a sailor. I’ve always said that being a sailor means oilskin and overalls! I am good with clothes with my entrepreneurial and commercial side and I still have a lot to learn about waxed.
Your Imoca projects revolve around 2 million euros: are you still a sailor or a company manager when you manage these sums?
At the beginning my project was very amateur: in Class40, I was still paid by the newspaper Le Figaro, I was sailing in my free time and I had a company that managed the boat but I didn’t earn anything, I had service providers but no employees, so it was easy to manage. Then I went from a budget of € 250,000 per year in Class40 to € 1.2 million in Imoca. The stakes are no longer the same, the team has grown, I have four employees, a press officer, more service providers than before. It is both exciting and interesting because there is all this project management-communication-partner relations-team management part, but there is always the risk of being too much on the entrepreneurial side and not enough on the sports side. I think I lost my Vendée Globe 2020 mainly because of this, I was not focused enough on sport and technique. My annual budget is between € 2 and € 2.2 million. I took out a loan of 800,000 euros to install new foils, so there are 2.3 million euros of capital left in the bank for an Imoca that is worth between 2.5 and 3 million euros.
Does having such financial commitments on your shoulders affect the way you surf?
The boat is insured for total loss but I have mortgaged my house for the boat and I am once again the guarantor of the foils. Being an entrepreneur does not only mean running a business, but also taking risks and this plays against the balance. Your mental load is not at all equal to that of the Formula 1 drivers, I think of the skippers who are only skippers and do not manage the rest, those who do not own the boats. My boat is my job. These are my cousins … on the pool table.
You don’t have just one, but several partners – isn’t that even more difficult to manage?
The multi-partner model takes a long time because you have to give to everyone, but it’s also a very solid project that has proven itself. After my first Vendée Globe, my boat wears the colors of Newrest – Matmut. Matmut stops but, behind, I still manage to buy a newer boat for 3 million euros. It is called Newrest – Art & Fenêtres for the Vendée Globe 2020 which I am abandoning. Behind, the boat is called Nexans – Art & Fenêtres and I’m doing a big project to change the foils. My project has grown stronger with the comings and goings of partners, which shows that there is a certain solidity. If I had only had one partner, I would certainly have experienced some desert crossings.
Are you still skipper of the TGV?
No, we have a house in Vannes since February 2021. And it is my wife who goes back and forth with the TGV and I am in Brittany, close to my place of work: we have three daughters aged 14, 12 and 9 who are satisfied and very happy to live in Brittany. It’s our deal with my wife. On weekdays I shop at the supermarket, do my homework, meals, laundry, washing machines. Family life thing.
