Match race to the line as Bourgnon and Horeau take Route du Rhum wins

It’s not often that two class winners in a transatlantic race cross the finish line within two minutes of each other – let alone after a tacking duel around the island. But that’s how the Route du Rhum – Destination Guadeloupe crowned its Ocean Fifty and IMOCA champions in the early hours of this morning.

Basile Bourgnon (Edenred) took the Ocean Fifty class at 01:12:23 local time, with Corentin Horeau (MACSF) following him across the line off Pointe-à-Pitre at 01:14:09 to win the IMOCA class. Both smashed their class records, though both results remain subject to jury review.

The two former Figaro rivals ended up side by side for the final lap of Guadeloupe, a 60ft monohull and a 50ft trimaran match racing for bragging rights, three days after fellow Trinitain Tom Laperche won the race overall on SVR-Lazartigue.

“Three friends from La Trinité-sur-Mer – we’re neighbours; we even share the same morning coffee down at the harbour,” said Bourgnon on the dock. “I believe this Route du Rhum will go down in history.”

At 37, the 2023 Solitaire du Figaro winner was racing his first solo Route du Rhum, aboard the IMOCA that Yoann Richomme sailed to second in the last Vendée Globe. His time of 9 days, 17 hours, 12 minutes and 9 seconds is more than two days inside Thomas Ruyant’s 2022 class record.

The race was decided two days in. When fellow leaders Sam Goodchild (MACIF Santé Prévoyance) and Ambrogio Beccaria (Allagrande Mapei) headed north in search of a shorter route through light winds, Horeau held a direct course, punched through the front and chained together fast gybes down a narrow corridor of breeze. At one point he led by more than 300 miles.

“They made the decision to gybe right in front of me – I didn’t quite understand why,” Horeau said. “I went back to my computer and told myself, ‘I want to cross this front as quickly as possible.’ At one point, I saw them on the AIS, and after that, I never saw them again.”

It wasn’t all plain sailing. A bow hatch opened in 35 knots and the boat began taking on water. “I nearly had to retire right then and there,” he admitted, before sealing it with Sika and pressing on.

Otherwise, Horeau describes something close to a flow state. “For two or three days, it was as if I were somehow above everyone else – it’s a rather pleasant feeling,” he said. “I didn’t fundamentally change the way I sail, but sometimes you just hit a ‘sweet spot’.”

He’d called it, too, telling his first MACSF team meeting they could do something special with this boat “before the new generation of boats arrives”.

Aged 24, Bourgnon is the youngest class winner in Route du Rhum history since Ellen MacArthur, then 22, in 1998. His time of 9 days, 17 hours, 10 minutes and 23 seconds lowers the Ocean Fifty record by more than a day.

The pre-race favourite led from the outset, hitting 43.1 knots along the way, and was 117 miles clear by 7 November. Then he lost his J0, a crucial sail in light and heavy air alike.

“When you have a boat that looks like the Flying Dutchman from Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s frustrating,” he said. “I didn’t handle things well, and things started falling apart.” His shore team, Jean-Luc Nélias and Martin Le Pape, talked him back into the fight.

What followed was a tropical depression, gybes in a thin northerly breeze and, on the final night, five or six hours helming under the stars with no electronics at all. Bourgnon reckons he slept barely nine hours in nine days.

Then came Horeau. “I could see him trying to blanket my wind to keep me from moving forward, so I’d break away,” Bourgnon said. “With ten miles left, I found myself thinking: ‘What kind of game are you playing, buddy?’”

His father, the late Laurent Bourgnon, won this race outright in 1994 and 1998 – still the only skipper to do so twice – and Basile spent seven years of his childhood sailing around the world with him.

“Winning this is such a wonderful tribute to my father up above – he, too, once walked these very docks,” he said. “I thought of him throughout the entire crossing. I even think he lent me a hand – or two, or three.”

The Ultim podium is complete, with Thomas Coville and Louis Burton following Laperche home. The fight for the IMOCA podium goes on, with Boris Herrmann (Malizia) and Goodchild the leading contenders, while the rest of the Ocean Fifty fleet, the big Class40 fleet and the Vintage classes still have miles to sail.

Follow the rest of the fleet on the Route du Rhum tracker.