Maxime Sorel overtook his rivals in the final miles to pull off a genuine coup, finishing fifth in the Route du Rhum, Destination Guadeloupe, a result that feels like a win for the skipper of Vaincre la Mucoviscidose. Guadeloupean onlookers might have had a fright spotting a dragon tearing across the water off their coast as he made his charge.
"Since I arrived at Tête à l'Anglais, I've wanted to cry. And it's rare for me to cry." Rounding the north of Guadeloupe, Sorel realised he had just completed the race, a month after he wasn't even sure he'd make the start line.
**The hunger to go**
"We had a thousand reasons to stop, and one reason we kept going, the association Vaincre la Mucoviscidose," the skipper said on the pontoon after arriving. Visibly emotional, Sorel struggled to explain his performance and that hard-fought fifth place, especially given how little sailing he'd managed this year.
"I had a hunger to be there, a hunger to go, but psychologically I wasn't really ready." The pace was relentless from the second night onwards, and fatigue piled up through the crossing. He even gashed his eyebrow just hours before crossing the finish line, but experience won out in the end.
"It all came down to the Saintes channel. Two rookies out there. I'm not even sure they'd sailed that stretch before," Sorel explained. "Depending on the wind, you can hug the coast even when it feels like you're about to run aground. They tacked twice. I tacked zero times." It was the icing on the cake for what he called his "most beautiful transat", one he thoroughly enjoyed "without any pressure to deliver a result".
**A collective victory**
"It's completely mad, because there was a moment I genuinely thought we'd be on our knees and not even make it to the start," Sorel recalled. "In Saint-Malo we were saying: we're leaving, but we don't even know what money we'll come back with."
Short on budget and sponsors, the team launched a crowdfunding campaign just before the start, offering a name painted on the hull in exchange for a donation. Arriving at the pontoon, 1116 names glinted on the hull under the spotlights.
"When we launched this campaign, so many people rallied to the cause. And in a time when there's a tendency to divide, this project brought people together. Today we've won. It's a genuine collective victory."
Here's hoping it's a springboard for what comes next, so the dragon can keep slicing through the water in search of more results. Tonight, in front of an adoring crowd, he had already won the one that matters most: the crowd's heart.
