Thomas Coville crossed the line second in the Ultim class at the Route du Rhum, and the result flatters a race that nearly fell apart in its opening days. The French skipper of Sodebo Ultim 3 kept the scale of his troubles quiet during the race: he lost both his foils not long after the start, a setback that would have ended most campaigns outright.
"Before leaving, people asked me what I was chasing. I'd said: I want to fly across the Atlantic," Coville said on arrival. "From the start of the race it went out fast with the two leaders. We were lying in ambush behind them, except on the very first day I lost a brand-new foil. A few days later I lost the second one."
Sailing an Ultim with no foils at all, he said, was hard even to picture.
"I've never buried the bows on an Ultim the way I buried mine, three times over," Coville said. "In my head I was tormented seeing that my performance was only at 85 percent of the boat's polars."
Holding the podium meant digging deeper than he expected to.
"To get this second place I went a very, very long way," he said. "I'm proud of what I produced, physically and mentally, with what I had left. I never once gave up to finish here, in second place. I'm aware this place is also partly down to several retirements."
The highlight of his race, Coville said, was his battle with Louis Burton aboard Ultim Armand Thiery, a skipper who has only recently taken over the boat.
"I loved that fight with Louis Burton. He's just taken on this boat. We'd said in the Ultim class that fresh blood would be good for it, and there's the proof. He settled in fast, into the deep end straight away. That fight may have saved my Route du Rhum. It kept me in a competitor's mindset, chasing a sporting result."
The perfect race, though, belonged to someone else.
"Tom Laperche, on SVR Lazartigue, sailed the perfect race. I think they delivered the finest match this fleet has produced in years. I want to say thank you Louis, and well done Tom."
Coville also had warm words for sailors across the other classes, including Corentin Horeau in IMOCA, Guillaume Pirouelle and Pierre Le Boucher in Class40, and Léonard Legrand aboard Sodebo Fifty in Ocean Fifty.
On his routing team, he credited the bond built with Benjamin Schwarz over several years, alongside Simon Fisher and Chris Bedford, for delivering the best possible race from within their own bubble.
Asked whether this was his last Route du Rhum, Coville wouldn't commit either way.
"I've always sailed the Route du Rhum as if it were my last. But one day I'd love to fly completely and fight across the Atlantic with a boat like this one. It's such an incredible privilege to sail these machines. Right now we're arriving with a lack of maturity on this generation of foils, ones we designed but never managed to fully perfect."
