Route du Rhum runners and riders: IMOCA

Twenty-two IMOCAs, no former class winner on the start line and a fleet full of proven boats in new hands, along with some new cutting-edge designs still finding their feet. Here’s how the IMOCA class shapes up for the Route du Rhum start off Saint-Malo on 1 November.

There will be a new name on the IMOCA trophy in Pointe-à-Pitre. Thomas Ruyant, who won the class four years ago, won’t be on the start line to defend it, and nobody else in the fleet has won the Rhum in an IMOCA.

Look at the boats and a second pattern emerges. The Vendée Globe winner, the Vendée Globe runner-up, Ruyant’s old boat, Boris Herrmann’s old boat, a two-time Rhum winner and Loïck Peyron’s old Gitana are all here, sailed by someone new.

Here’s who’s in the running.

Sam Goodchild has done almost everything right in the IMOCA class. The one race he has never finished is this one.

In 2018 his Class40 dismasted while running seventh. Four years later in an Ocean Fifty, he was tipped to win. However, a pedestal winch backwound during the start and the handles struck him. With injuries to his arms and face, his race was over within minutes of the gun.

Since then the 36-year-old Franco-British sailor, who grew up aboard his family’s boat until the age of seven, has become one of the most reliable performers in offshore racing. He won the IMOCA Globe Series in 2023 and again last year, and finished ninth in the Vendée Globe on an older boat. In 2025 Charlie Dalin asked him to step in on MACIF Santé Prévoyance while he dealt with his health, and Goodchild won the Course des Caps and the Défi Azimut with Loïs Berrehar before taking third in the Transat Café L’Or.

This season, sailing solo, he has won the 1000 Race and the Défi Azimut 48-hour race – setting the fastest speed run in the event’s history, at a 32.1-knot average, along the way. Even his rivals concede he’s the man to beat. “Sam might be a notch above the rest,” says Beyou, though he adds that with an open course and “a great deal of the unknown”, the race “remains wide open”.

Goodchild doesn’t have it all his own way. His season has turned into a running duel with Beccaria: the Italian beat him in the light airs at the end of the Vendée Arctique, and Goodchild returned the favour in the Défi Azimut. Their boats are built around very different ideas, and Goodchild is blunt about what that means. “When he goes fast, we struggle,” he says, “and when we go fast, he struggles.” Expect the weather in the first few days to shape that contest.

“I’m proud to be labelled a favourite,” he says, “but I also know that doesn’t mean anything.”

This campaign carries extra weight. Dalin died in June, aged 42, and Goodchild will take the boat Dalin conceived, and sailed to Vendée Globe victory, across the Atlantic one last time. MACIF Santé Prévoyance is now for sale, and Goodchild moves to a new Verdier design early next year. Few results this November would mean more.

If anyone can upset Goodchild, it may well be the sailor who beat him the last time they crossed an ocean together. Jérémie Beyou and Morgan Lagravière won the Transat Café L’Or last November, with Goodchild third.

This is Beyou’s fifth Rhum, and the record is one of near-misses. He had to retire in 2006 and 2018, was second in 2014 and third in 2022, behind Ruyant and Dalin. Victory here is the big gap on a list of honours that includes three Solitaire du Figaro wins, victory in the Volvo Ocean Race with Dongfeng and fourth place in the last Vendée Globe.

Four years ago Charal 2 was barely out of the box. Now the 50-year-old knows it inside out, and it has had serious surgery over the winter: six months in the yard, including a complete redesign of the bow. Beyou reckons he has closed the gap to MACIF Santé Prévoyance upwind in moderate to fresh breeze and is now at least as quick on a reach. He suspects Goodchild has found more pace downwind since last year, though.

The Transat Café L’Or showed what patience can do. Beyou knew Charal would come into its own once the trade winds filled in beyond the Canaries, and told his co-skipper as much while they waited. “Morgan, stay calm, our time will come,” he recalls. When it did, Charal sailed away from the fleet.

It’s also the end of an era. Charal announced in July that this will be Beyou’s final race with the sponsor after ten years and two boats. Don’t mistake that for a farewell to the class, though: he’s talking to other teams about defending his Transat Café L’Or title next year, and an Ultim or another Vendée Globe further down the line isn’t ruled out. First, though, there’s the one race that has always got away.

Ruyant may not be in Saint-Malo to defend his title, but his old boat is, and it’s in very capable hands.

Only one sailor has beaten Goodchild in a solo race this year, and his name is Ambrogio Beccaria. In June, in his first solo race on the IMOCA he bought from Ruyant, the Italian won the Vendée Arctique. He did it the hard way, needing to dive under the hull five times off Ireland to free a fishing net from the keel and dropping to fifth before reeling in Élodie Bonafous and then Goodchild in the light airs off Les Sables d’Olonne. It made him the first Italian to win a solo IMOCA race. He followed it up with second place behind Goodchild in the Défi Azimut and sits third in the IMOCA Globe Series.

The Rhum is familiar territory. Four years ago Beccaria finished second in Class40 barely two months after first sailing his new boat, and he went on to win the 2023 Transat Jacques Vabre in the class. This is his first Rhum in an IMOCA, on a boat that has gone fastest when the wind is behind it. If the trade winds settle in early, he arrives as the most obvious threat to the favourite.

It didn’t take Élodie Bonafous long to make her mark in the IMOCA class. In her debut season last year, the 31-year-old Breton finished second in the Course des Caps, then won the IMOCA class of the Rolex Fastnet, the first woman to do so. Her first Atlantic crossing followed in the Transat Café L’Or.

This year she has switched to solo racing, and the results have been close to the front. In the Vendée Arctique she was ahead of Beccaria until the final day, before light airs and a 12-hour penalty cost her a place on the podium. She heads to Saint-Malo fifth in the championship.

Bonafous's Verdier design, built by MerConcept, is a sistership of MACIF Santé Prévoyance, which makes it the closest thing the fleet has to a benchmark against the favourite.

This is her first Rhum, and she isn’t underestimating it. “Crossing the Atlantic is no small feat,” she says. But on current form she’s a genuine podium contender.

Here’s a stat that may surprise you: the skipper leading the 2026 IMOCA Globe Series isn’t Goodchild. It’s Francesca Clapcich, on 356 points to his 280.

The Italian-American, a two-time Olympian for Italy, won The Ocean Race in 2023 with the 11th Hour Racing team. She launched her own solo campaign last year with the 2028 Vendée Globe as the target, then made her IMOCA skipper debut in the Transat Café L’Or, finishing second with Will Harris – the best IMOCA result by a woman since Ellen MacArthur in 2005.

Her boat has history in this race too. As Malizia-Seaexplorer, the 2022 VPLP design was Boris Herrmann’s ride in the last Rhum, and during The Ocean Race in 2023 it set the 24-hour monohull record of 641.13 miles.

Her season has been a steady climb. Fifth in her first solo IMOCA race, the 1000 Race, she described the duel with Bonafous and Violette Dorange as “fight, fight, fight” all the way. Fifth again in the Vendée Arctique, her longest solo race to date, she brought the boat home undamaged. “I have proven to myself that I was able to race in really big conditions,” she said afterwards.

Then came The Ocean Race Atlantic. The only female skipper in the six-boat fleet, she lost to Paul Meilhat’s United by the Ocean by just 8 minutes 56 seconds after almost eight days of racing. That result, in a crewed race most of her Rhum rivals didn’t enter, built much of her championship lead. The question in Saint-Malo is how much of that pace she can carry solo. This is her first Rhum, and a top-five finish would make her a name to watch for the 2028 Vendée Globe.

WATCH: Francesca Clapcich talks downwind speed, the fear factor and coming full circle

Violette Dorange became one of the stories of the last Vendée Globe. At 23 she was the race’s youngest ever finisher, taking 25th on Jean Le Cam’s old boat, while the videos she shared from on board drew more than half a million followers on Instagram. This season she has turned that profile into results.

The 25-year-old from Rochefort took over Initiatives-Cœur from Sam Davies in January after a year sailing alongside her, with Davies staying on as coach and technical adviser. It’s a big step up: Dorange went round the world on a daggerboard boat, and this is her first foiler. The Manuard design was launched in 2022, built in the moulds of Armel Tripon’s old L’Occitane en Provence. Over the winter the team replaced three sails, added a ballast and reworked the ergonomics around her.

It has paid off. Dorange was third in the 1000 Race and third again in the Vendée Arctique, where Bonafous’s penalty opened the door to her first IMOCA podium. Fifth in the Défi Azimut 48-hour race, as the top woman, she sits fourth in the championship.

This is her first Rhum and her first big solo race on a foiler, so the team is realistic: a solid top-ten finish is the target. As ever with Initiatives-Cœur, there’s more at stake than the result. The project has funded heart surgery for 532 children since 2009.

For Boris Herrmann, this is a case of déjà vu. Four years ago the Rhum was his first solo race on a brand-new Malizia, before he damaged the foils and finished 24th. That boat is now Clapcich’s 11th Hour Racing.

Now he’s back with Malizia 4, a radical new Koch design launched in Lorient in July. Its first race was The Ocean Race Atlantic from New York in September, and the early signs were encouraging: it won the event’s sprint series before a collision damaged the foil system and dropped the team to fourth. A torn mainsail in training since then hasn’t helped.

“The Route du Rhum will be my first solo race on this boat,” says Herrmann, calling it “a very important step in the build-up to the Vendée Globe”. However the Rhum goes, there’s little time to dwell on the result. Straight after Guadeloupe, the German heads for Alicante and the start of The Ocean Race on 17 January.

WATCH: Next-gen IMOCA: What's really changed in Malizia 4

Sébastien Simon finished third in the last Vendée Globe despite losing a foil in the Indian Ocean. Rather than buy a proven boat, he and his sponsor chose to build new.

The result is a Verdier design built by Carrington Boats in Southampton, launched on 13 August and christened in Les Sables d’Olonne on 3 September, with Air Caraïbes on one side and French bee on the other. It’s the newest of the three Verdier designs among the front-runners, alongside MACIF Santé Prévoyance and Bonafous’s boat, and the Rhum will be its first race.

Simon, a Solitaire du Figaro winner and a composites engineer by training, will need every bit of that knowledge to keep a boat less than three months old in one piece across the Atlantic.

No one in this fleet has won the Rhum in an IMOCA, but Armel Tripon is the only skipper here who has won a class. In 2018 he took the Multi50 class in 11 days, 7 hours and 32 minutes, finishing third across the line out of 123 starters. He was also fourth in the IMOCA class in 2014 and fifth in Ocean Fifty in 2022.

His new boat is one of the most interesting in Saint-Malo. Designed by VPLP and launched in June 2025, Les P’tits Doudous is 65 per cent built from decommissioned carbon fibre from Airbus’s technocentre in Nantes, with only key structural parts such as the mast and keel bulkheads in virgin carbon. Even some of the deck fittings are made from recycled medical titanium, and the foils were optimised to take off earlier.

It fits the hand-me-down theme too. The hull came out of the Malizia-Seaexplorer mould, which makes it a sistership of Clapcich’s 11th Hour Racing, while Tripon’s previous boat provided the mould for Dorange’s Initiatives-Cœur.

Tripon showed in the 2020–21 Vendée Globe that he can push a radical boat hard: on L’Occitane en Provence, Sam Manuard’s scow-bowed design, he was the fastest of anyone between the two equator crossings, on his way to 11th overall. The Rhum will be the 51-year-old’s first solo transatlantic on Les P’tits Doudous. He arrives as an outsider, but not one anyone should write off.

Corentin Horeau may be the most dangerous of the newcomers. The 2023 Solitaire du Figaro winner is sailing MACSF, formerly Paprec Arkéa, the boat Yoann Richomme took to second in the last Vendée Globe. Horeau was second in his first solo IMOCA race, the 1000 Race, and was running second in the Vendée Arctique when a J3 chainplate failed and forced him out. He was also second in the Défi Azimut’s Tour de Groix, 1 minute 23 seconds behind Goodchild.

Nico d’Estais leads the race within the race for the non-foilers. Café Joyeux, a 2010 VPLP-Verdier design, has won the Rhum twice and the Vendée Globe once under previous names, and the former McKinsey consultant sits seventh in the championship – the highest-placed daggerboard boat.

And Jean-Baptiste Daramy brings a slice of history to Saint-Malo. His ANETT-KALHYGE is the former Gitana Eighty, the 2007 Farr design built for Loïck Peyron and later raced by Jean Le Cam and Romain Attanasio. A composites engineer from the Basque Country, Daramy only bought the boat in May, and his 1,200-mile qualifier was his first solo sail in an IMOCA.

On paper, this is Goodchild’s race to lose. He has the boat, the form and a season of wins behind him. But Beyou has the experience and, he believes, the speed to punish any mistake. Beccaria has already shown he can beat him, and Bonafous, Clapcich, Dorange and Horeau are all capable of a surprise.

Whoever wins will be winning the IMOCA class of the Rhum for the first time. And with Vendée Globe points on the line too, nobody can afford to ease off.