Saint-Malo's finish line delivered a night few will forget, with Basile Bourgnon and Corentin Horeau arriving within sight of each other after rounding Guadeloupe, each sealing victory in their respective classes at the Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe.
The scenes at the Memorial Act were raw. Tom Laperche and Thomas Coville joined the celebrations, delighted to share in moments that will be written into the race's history. Tom held Basile in a long embrace. Watching two big men in tears on Edenred's trampoline, sharing a childhood dream fulfilled, was the kind of image that stops you in your tracks.
Basile's voice is soft, oddly at odds with the colossus of a frame he's built over nearly ten days of sailing on a knife's edge. Exhausted, clearly, but he found the words. At one point he asked Thomas Coville to "let him grow a little" when the Sodebo skipper seemed to wink and suggest he come join the Ultim class.
Corentin wasn't shy about a few dance steps to the sound of the bagpipes either. His eyes showed the strain, but physically he looked ready to go again. He'd run his race differently, as the undisputed leader, managing a historic lead rather than chasing one. The MACSF skipper was modest about the win, proud simply of having followed his plan without worrying about the opposition. It was a hold-up of a victory, but a deserved one.
Both men won their classes outright, then found themselves drawn together off Guadeloupe for a consequence-free match race, a throwback to their Figaro days when they used to scrap it out at the front of the fleet.
For Bourgnon, the win carried deep personal weight. "It wasn't an easy race, nobody sold it to me as one. It means a lot to us, to the family. What a wonderful tribute to my father up there, having won it, him who was on these pontoons too. I thought about him throughout the crossing. I even think he gave me a hand once or twice."
There's a tight circle behind the result too. Bourgnon, Laperche and Horeau are all from La Trinité-sur-Mer, neighbours who drink the same coffee at the port each morning. "Three mates from La Trinité-sur-Mer, it's mad, it's quite a story and I think this Route du Rhum will stay etched in history for us, like it will for a lot of people."
Bourgnon also described a gear failure that nearly ended his race, a torn genoa he repaired with help from his shore team, Jean-Luc Nélias and Martin Le Pape talking him through it. He never let go of the race after that, eventually finding what he called "the little mouse hole" that let him stretch his lead again.
The closing stages against Horeau turned into a proper tactical scrap, tacking back and forth through the final night. "I'd never done that before. Corentin was a rival, but also a mate. We know exactly how the other sails."
Sleep was almost nonexistent. Bourgnon reckons his total across nine days of racing came to barely nine hours. "If you want to go fast, you have to be alert to every movement of the boat, because if there's a bigger wave than the rest, it can take you, and that happened to me twice."
For Horeau, the result still feels slightly unreal. "Even in my wildest dreams I couldn't have imagined it." He described watching rivals Ambrogio Beccaria and Sam Goodchild gybe just ahead of him, a move he didn't understand, before deciding simply to cut through the weather front as fast as he could. He never saw them again after that on the AIS.
He credited the tight-knit fleet for helping him through the toughest stretches. "We're all good mates in the class, and in sailing generally. Every day we were getting messages from one person or another. I think we needed that too, because it's so hard and so stressful."
A near miss almost ended his campaign too, a forward hatch that burst open and flooded the boat in 35 knots of wind. He patched it with Sika adhesive and kept going, though he suspects the bulkheads will need checking once he's ashore.
For both skippers, the win felt earned rather than accidental, however dreamlike it was crossing the line. As Horeau put it, "it didn't come from nowhere, you have to go all in, it's like that in life generally."
