Thomas Coville is approaching his eighth Route du Rhum, Destination Guadeloupe with the calm of a sailor who has lived through nearly everything the ocean can throw at him. The 58-year-old Sodebo Ultim 3 skipper has made peace with the nerves of the start line and the strange emptiness that follows a finish. These days he talks about living in the moment, a freedom he says took a lifetime at sea to learn.
Coville knows almost every face and every boat in this race by now. He first came to the Rhum aged ten, brought along by his schoolteacher. The real pull of the open ocean, though, came much later, and it arrived suddenly.
Returning from Australia after his studies, he found himself face to face with a man he fell for instantly: Laurent Bourgnon. "Everything derails," Coville recalls. "All the plans, everything explodes because what he's doing is exactly what I want to do." True to form, Bourgnon pushed him to find his own way rather than ride his coattails, telling him he risked becoming just a technician if he stayed too close. Coville followed that advice, working first as a boat preparer before racing the Orma trimarans, admitting he "wasn't very well prepared" for that level at the time.
Then came 2006, which he still rates as his finest edition, finishing third on Sodeb'O just nine minutes ahead of Michel Desjoyeaux. "That's when I started telling myself I was playing with the best," he says. There was also 2014, when he retired after colliding with a cargo ship. He's blunt about it now: "When you mess up, you mess up. You have to wait four years. A Route du Rhum is a final."
Third place in 2022 wasn't high enough for his liking, and it left him with a sense of unfinished business. "We should have done better," he admits. After an honest debrief, he overhauled the entire project, bringing in new faces, new thinking, and a reworked boat that had lacked a touch of performance at key moments. He's chasing a win he's wanted since his IMOCA victory back in 1998.
Last winter, on a January morning, Coville and his crew of "Sodeboys" smashed the Jules Verne Trophy record, circling the globe in 40 days, 10 hours and 45 minutes, 12 hours quicker than Francis Joyon's previous mark from 2017. It was a long-held dream for Coville and for his Sodebo counterpart Benjamin Schwartz, who Coville says had been chasing that trophy for eight years. Not long after, Schwartz told him he wanted to help him win the next Rhum, with Coville promising in return to help take him to the Arkea Ultim Challenge.
Whether this is his last Rhum, Coville won't say. "I've always raced the Route du Rhum as if it were the last one. I have a lot of outside interest, I'm thinking it over. I don't set myself limits, I never have."
He's encouraged by the fresh blood entering the Ultim class, once treated with scepticism when he rebuilt Olivier de Kersauson's old trimaran Geronimo. He singles out Guirec Soudée aboard Liamm as a favourite, calling his different outlook refreshing. Alexia Barrier also gets a mention, having set the first female Jules Verne Trophy record earlier this year with her crew aboard The Famous Project. And Louis Burton, in Coville's eyes, might be doing the class the most good of all, proving a path from IMOCA into Ultim is possible.
Closer to home, there's Léonard Legrand, who has taken over Sodebo Fifty. Coville is careful not to call it a handover. "With Léo, we tried to set a rule: he can ask me any question he wants, but I never ask him any." He says watching Legrand grow has been one of his great pleasures lately.
"My biggest trophy right now," Coville says, "is him."
