Thirty-six years ago, Florence Arthaud won the Route du Rhum 1990. She remains the only woman ever to have topped the podium in the legendary solo transatlantic race, and more than a decade after her death, her name still carries weight among those preparing to cross the Atlantic this season.
Arthaud, known to the French public as "the fiancée of the Atlantic", died in 2013. A film about her was released in 2023, a special edition publication has appeared recently, and her books continue to sell in paperback.
Her life was, in many ways, a declaration of independence.
She never cared much what people thought of her, and she never spoke of wanting to be remembered. Yet 36 years on, she remains vivid in the memories of sailors and fans alike. She sits comfortably in the history books and, more quietly, as a point of reference for the generation of women now making their mark in offshore racing.
"I always answered the supernatural call of the sea," she once wrote, a line that captures something essential about her.
Her 1990 arrival in Guadeloupe aboard Pierre 1er remains one of the enduring images of the race: a small figure standing on the deck of a giant boat, pure joy on her face. It was the first time she had been able to build a boat exactly to her own design, and the first time she had a partner who believed in her without reservation. Offshore, she pushed herself because she knew no other way to be. She suffered a miscarriage mid-race and kept it to herself, a reflection of an era that left little room for women to speak of such pain.
Her writing reveals more than the public image suggested. A happy childhood in a well-to-do Paris neighbourhood, a loving family, a father who worked as a publisher, posters of Moitessier and Che Guevara on her bedroom wall. Yet she wanted to blow all that apart, to flirt with limits and test forbidden things, just to feel alive. "Having lived inside a bubble of happiness shaped without my knowledge, I wanted to start again from zero, to be sure of being myself and not merely a projection of my parents' happiness, or of the society I was born into," she wrote.
Going to sea may have been an escape. It was certainly an outlet. "At sea, the ghosts reassure me," she wrote, "on land, they frighten me."
Her words still resonate. Violette, Alexia, Francesca, Anne-Claire, Sasha and the rest of the fleet lining up for the Route du Rhum, Destination Guadeloupe, might all recognise themselves in her simplest line: "only the sea will never disappoint me."
Among them is Sasha Lanièce, a physicist turned solo sailor making her Route du Rhum debut at the helm of her Class40 Alderan. Her own path from the laboratory to the open ocean echoes something of Arthaud's restless search for a life lived on her own terms.
