Route du Rhum runners and riders: Ocean Fifty

Ten 50ft trimarans, no defending champion and a fleet full of Route du Rhum debutants. Here’s how the Ocean Fifty class shapes up for the start off Saint-Malo on 1 November.

Four years ago the Ocean Fifty class served up one of the tightest finishes in Route du Rhum history, with Erwan Le Roux holding off Quentin Vlamynck by just 18 minutes after almost 11 days at sea.

Le Roux won’t be back to defend it. The two-time class winner has withdrawn for budget reasons, leaving the door wide open in a fleet where only one skipper has started this race in an Ocean Fifty before.

That doesn’t make it any easier to call. “There are so many variables to master that it’s almost impossible to forecast the outcome in this class,” says Anne-Claire Le Berre. Here’s our best attempt anyway.

If the class has a favourite, it’s Basile Bourgnon.

The name carries weight in Saint-Malo. Basile’s late father, Laurent Bourgnon, won the Rhum twice in the 1990s on the ORMA trimaran Primagaz. At 24 years old, Basile has been fast-tracked through the ranks: co-skipper in Class40 at 17 alongside his mentor Emmanuel Le Roch in the 2019 Transat Jacques Vabre, then the Mini Transat, then second place in the 2023 Solitaire du Figaro.

Edenred, a new build launched in July 2025, won its very first race. Bourgnon and Le Roch then led the Transat Café L’Or for long stretches before gear damage dropped them off the podium. This year he has been the most consistent sailor in the class: second and fourth in the two Mediterranean Grand Prix acts, a 65-mile victory in the Drheam Cup – his first solo race on the boat – and he defended his 24H Ultim title in September, this time solo. He also leads the Ocean Fifty Series.

Bourgnon is careful not to get carried away. A great team and a smooth preparation are, he says, “no guarantee of what will happen during the race itself”. But he finished last year’s transatlantic with “a burning hunger to win”, and nothing he’s done since suggests that has faded.

Matthieu Perraut has had this race in his sights since he stepped up to the Ocean Fifty class in 2024. Elvest started life as Sébastien Rogues’ Primonial, the 2024 series winner, before Perraut and Rogues joined forces in 2025.

It hasn’t all gone to plan. Perraut’s boat was one of three Ocean Fifties to capsize on the first night of last year’s Transat Café L’Or. But he won the class at the Fastnet a few months earlier, and after a winter of repairs and a rebrand to Elvest, this season the campaign has clicked. With Rogues in charge for the crewed racing, Elvest won both Mediterranean Grand Prix acts.

Perraut then took over for the solo events and finished second to Bourgnon in the 24H Ultim in September, the final hit-out before Saint-Malo. Elvest sits second in the series, five points off Edenred – and on this season’s evidence, it’s the boat most likely to stop Bourgnon.

Thibaut Vauchel-Camus is the only skipper in this year’s fleet who has raced the Rhum in an Ocean Fifty before – and the only one for whom the finish is home. Raised in Guadeloupe, he sets off from Port-Mer, a stone’s throw from the start line at the Pointe du Grouin, and races to his other home across the Atlantic. Small wonder he describes the Rhum as his personal race.

His record here is strong but scarred. He was second in Class40 in 2014, third in Multi50 in 2018, then capsized while leading the Ocean Fifty fleet four years ago. A year later he and Quentin Vlamynck won the 2023 Transat Jacques Vabre, leading almost from start to finish.

He now sails the 2020 Romaric Neyhousser design that Vlamynck took to second in the last Rhum, 18 minutes short of victory. Co-president of the class, and a long-time campaigner for multiple sclerosis awareness through the Solidaires en Peloton project, Vauchel-Camus has found 2026 harder going and sits seventh of 11 in the series. But nobody in this fleet knows the road to Pointe-à-Pitre better.

Pierre Quiroga is one of the few in this fleet with a major solo title to his name, having won the Solitaire du Figaro in 2021 after cutting his teeth in Olympic sailing and match racing.

The 34-year-old has been knocking on the door in transatlantics ever since stepping up to Ocean Fifty: third in the 2023 Transat Jacques Vabre, then second in last year’s Transat Café L’Or with Gaston Morvan, overtaken only in the closing hours.

Quiroga struggled in the two inshore Grand Prix acts that opened the 2026 season, and Wewise was bottom of the standings after both. Offshore he’s a different proposition. He was at the front for the whole of the Drheam Cup, finishing third, just five minutes behind Le Berre, and has climbed to third in the series. On a 3,500-mile solo sprint, this is exactly where he does his best work.

Baptiste Hulin arrives as the class’s reigning transatlantic champion. He and Thomas Rouxel won last year’s Transat Café L’Or, taking over at the front when the long-time leaders on Edenred broke their gennaker pole mid-Atlantic, then winning a three-way fight to the line by just five miles.

Hulin took the scenic route to the top. He raced two Transat Jacques Vabres and a Rhum in Class40 before joining Viabilis Océans’ technical team, then got the helm in 2024. The boat is a 2017 VPLP design that used to be Sam Goodchild’s Leyton – not the newest in the fleet, but one that has already shown it can win the big ones.

It’s been a low-key season since, with Hulin eighth in the series, though he was fourth in the Drheam Cup, 27 minutes behind Le Berre. He has already shown he can be in the right place when it matters.

Léonard Legrand spent ten years inside Team Sodebo as an embedded-electronics engineer before getting a boat of his own. Now he’s one half of Sodebo’s first-ever two-boat Rhum line-up, alongside Thomas Coville in the Ultim class.

His boat has pedigree: Sodebo Fifty is the 2009 VPLP design on which Erwan Le Roux won the 2014 Route du Rhum. Coville sailed with him in the early days to help him get to grips with the trimaran, and the learning curve has been steep. He took a strong third in the 24H Ultim in September and sits sixth in the series. It’s his first Rhum and his first solo season, but ten years wiring Sodebo’s boats means there’s little on board he can’t fix himself.

Anne-Claire Le Berre makes history as the first woman to race an Ocean Fifty in the Route du Rhum. A Figaro sailor by background, she runs the boat with MerConcept, the team founded by François Gabart, and has raced the crewed series with an all-female crew.

A naval architect by training and a former world number one in women’s match racing, Le Berre has raced Minis, Figaros, Class40s and The Ocean Race, and has been to the Rhum twice before as a technical director. In her first solo race on the boat, July’s Drheam Cup, she took second place, and Upwind by MerConcept sits fifth in the series.

Erwan Le Draoulec and Lazare x Hellio were second at Ajaccio, edged out of the Act win only after a final-day jury hearing. Fourth in the series, Le Draoulec will want to put last year’s Transat Café L’Or capsize behind him.

Luke Berry carries home-town hopes on Le Rire Médecin Lamotte. The Saint-Malo sailor has 11 Class40 podiums to his name, won the Ocean Fifty class at the 2023 Fastnet in his first multihull season and finished third in the Transat Café L’Or. A capsize off Porquerolles in April cost him both Mediterranean Grand Prix acts, which explains his tenth place in the series.

Laurent Bourguès completes the fleet on La French Fab, a 2009 Irens-Cabaret design. Originally from Marseille, he set up his own Lorient-based team in 2022, and this is his third season in the Ocean Fifty Series, with the Rhum the goal all along.

Bourgnon has the form, with Perraut hot on his heels; Vauchel-Camus has the experience, and Quiroga and Hulin the transatlantic pedigree. In a class decided by 18 minutes last time out, and with most of the fleet racing it for the first time, this one could go to any of half a dozen boats.

What we do know is that someone new will be lifting the Ocean Fifty trophy in Pointe-à-Pitre. A Bourgnon win would bring the family story full circle, 28 years after Laurent’s second victory.