Pre-start favourite Sam Goodchild has unfinished business with the Route du Rhum
by Ed Gorman / IMOCA Globe Series 14 Oct 20:28 BST
Sam Goodchild © Jean-Louis Carli / IMOCA
This year's Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe - the 13th staging of the classic solo transatlantic race - has attracted a strong field of 22 IMOCA entries, among them the Class's top performer over the last two seasons, Sam Goodchild on board MACIF Santé Prévoyance.
Goodchild has an interesting history with the Route du Rhum, which starts on November 1st. It's a race he has never managed to finish having dismasted in Class 40s two editions ago, and then suffered a serious facial injury at the start four years ago on board his Ocean 50.
This time he means business and is looking forward not just to finishing the race, but doing his best to add what would be his sixth win in seven starts on board Charlie Dalin's 2022-vintage Guillaume Verdier-designed flying machine. "I'm looking forward to it," the 36-year-old Anglo-French MACIF skipper told the Class this week. "We're happy with how the preparation's gone. But the hard bit is left to do."
We put it to him that he has unfinished business with this 3,540-mile sprint to the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, which was won in 11 days and 17 hours by his former teammate at TR Racing, Thomas Ruyant, on board LinkedOut four years ago.
"If you want to put it that way, yeah. For sure, you never want a race to start or finish like that, but it has done," he said of his last two attempts at this course. "At the same time, both projects were ones where I learnt a lot as a sailor and who I am, so neither of them are lost to me. But obviously you would prefer to cross the finish line, and winning it would be even better, rather than being back at home. So yeah, it would be nice to finish this one off."
Meticulous and consistent, Goodchild is quick on all points of sail on MACIF, an exceptional all-round performer, but he will have his work cut out to get to Point-à-Pitre before anyone else. Among those vying for victory alongside him will be Boris Herrmann racing solo for the first time on his new Malizia 4; Jérémie Beyou sailing on board the much-optimised Charal for the last time; Sébastien Simon on the new Groupe Dubreuil-Air Caraïbes; and the Italian skipper Ambrogio Beccaria on Allagrande MAPEI with whom Goodchild has been having an intriguing battle this season, having come second to him in the Vendée Arctique but then beaten him in the Défi Azimut 48 Hours.
"You've got to keep an eye on everyone, but Ambrogio and Jérémie are obviously going to be there to give me a hard time," said Goodchild. "Charal is a really good all-round boat. They go very quick, Jérémie has all the experience and it's his last race on that boat. And Ambrogio has had a good season so far and it's interesting because he has a boat which is almost the opposite of ours. When he goes fast, we're struggling, and when we go fast, he's struggling - so I need to be good in the in-between bits!"
Setting sail late in the European calendar year, the Route du Rhum often starts with tough conditions in the Bay of Biscay and eastern Atlantic as the solo skippers go upwind into a depression, or a series of them. Goodchild knows it could be a war of attrition against the hard-driving Beccaria, but the vastly experienced MACIF skipper is not overly concerned, as he explained.
"It's offshore racing - it's all part of it," he said. "If we want to break our boats, we'd find a way of doing it; if we wanted to get there without taking any risks, we'd find a way of doing that. So it is trying to find that balance between the two. The Route du Rhum is going to have some tough bits where we are definitely going to have to push hard, and there are probably going to be some points where you have to throttle back. But how long for? And you have to make sure you are ready to go again when the time to push comes. It's a 10-day race, so if you have to stop you are not going to win the race, but at the same time, if you go easy you are not going to win it either."
This will be his last outing on board MACIF (which is now up for sale) before Goodchild takes delivery of a new Verdier design early next year. The Bristol-born sailor, who grew up on his family's cruising boats, is very aware that he was fortunate to take over a superb sailing machine that was already well proven in the hands of Dalin. "When I turned up the boat had been made to work already and all the de-bugging had been done. It had won the Vendée Globe, it had its new set of foils and was going quick. It's been a great partnership for me, the boat and the team and everyone," he summarised.
Now Goodchild and everyone else in the team would love to finish the year in which they lost Dalin with another win. "It's been a big year for the team and seeing Charlie go," said Goodchild. "The team I work with today is the team that won the Vendée Globe with him. Unfortunately his loss had been coming for a while, but that didn't make it any easier when it happened, and everyone would like to finish on a good note."