Two names that have carried the weight of the Route du Rhum for decades will both be on the start line this November, and neither belongs to a rookie chasing a slogan.
Tanguy Caradec, sailing Eurvad in Vintage Mono, is the son of Loïc Caradec, who died tragically during the 1986 edition. Basile Bourgnon, racing Edenred in Ocean Fifty, is the son of Laurent Bourgnon, twice winner of the race in 1994 and 1998. Their fathers shaped the race's history. Now it's their turn, lining up in a fleet that is finally set and ready to leave Saint-Malo.
This isn't simple tribute sailing.
Basile Bourgnon is 24, built like his father, and already one of the favourites in Ocean Fifty. He chose multihulls, he says, not because his father did, but because it always felt obvious to him, right from childhood. Tanguy Caradec is a different story altogether: 46, an enthusiastic amateur and a contented father himself, who leaves his Parisian week behind every weekend to go sailing without fail.
One is the professional skipper, the other the committed amateur. Both carry something bigger than their own ambitions.
"The Route du Rhum is inseparable from my father's life," Tanguy admits. "He was a great sailor." Basile agrees. "I can't deny the history. I discovered his career after the fact... If he hadn't been my father, I would still have admired him as an athlete."
Neither man shies away from the emotional weight of it. Basile points to the freedom his father instilled in him, and the need to be completely self-reliant at sea. Tanguy remembers a man who was "ingenious, mischievous," just as happy in the boatyard as out on the water.
Now it falls to them to cross the Atlantic themselves.
In Ocean Fifty, the racing is intense enough that there's little room for sentiment once the gun goes. Still, Basile admits: "On the water, I think he's watching me." Far from a burden, he says it can help. Tanguy, aboard his Vintage Mono, wants none of the pathos either. "Of course it's also a tribute to my father, but mostly I want to turn it into something happy."
Both men are chasing the same thing their fathers did a generation ago: turning hard effort into something joyful, somewhere out on that same stretch of Atlantic.
