French skipper Violette Dorange has been forced to withdraw from the Route du Rhum after her team confirmed that damage from a collision off Bréhat cannot be repaired in time to race.
The decision comes four days after Dorange's IMOCA Initiatives-Cœur collided with Romain Pilliard's trimaran Use It Again, roughly two hours after the Saint-Malo start on Sunday 1 November. Nobody was hurt, but both boats suffered material damage.
Dorange first put in to Roscoff for an initial assessment before heading to Lorient, where her technical team began a deeper inspection. That is where things turned.
Ultrasound checks and visual inspection only told part of the story. Once the team began deconstructing the damaged sections of the hull bottom, they found the skin, a composite sandwich with a honeycomb core, saturated with water. Further damage turned up beneath a structural element that also needs to be dismantled.
Fixing it properly means bringing the boat under cover, letting it dry out fully, then rebuilding the affected sections, a process that takes longer than the race schedule allows.
The circumstances of the collision remain under review by the race jury. Dorange's team says it will respect whatever decision is reached and will not comment further until then. They have also sent their thoughts to Pilliard and his Use It Again crew, hoping he can get back racing soon.
"It's obviously a big disappointment. I'm sad to have to stop here, but the state of the boat doesn't leave us a choice," Dorange said. "I want to thank the whole team for their commitment since Sunday, as well as everyone who came to support us in Roscoff and Lorient, not forgetting the many messages we received. That wave of solidarity touched me deeply. I'm already looking forward to getting back to competition. I'm also thinking a lot of Romain Pilliard and his team, as well as the other projects that suffered damage in this Route du Rhum."
Technical director Ronan Deshayes was blunt about the process. "We approached this job with one clear objective: do everything possible to let Violette restart, without ever compromising on safety or the integrity of the boat," he said. "We knew the first observations wouldn't be enough to give a full diagnosis, and that only deconstructing the affected areas would let us measure the damage precisely. The investigations showed the hull bottom needed a much bigger repair. That kind of work has to be done on the hard, and it takes time. That timeframe isn't compatible with racing. We have to put Violette's safety and the boat first."
The boat's race is over, but the mission behind it isn't. Dorange had set herself a target of helping save 20 children through this Route du Rhum campaign, and the effort has already helped 14.
Sponsors Les Chocolats du Cœur.fr and K-LINE are continuing to donate €1 to Mécénat Chirurgie Cardiaque for every new follower gained on Initiatives-Cœur's social media accounts, and will double public donations made through the campaign's fundraising page.
The team says it was moved by the support shown in both Roscoff and Lorient. Attention now turns to repairing the boat, with updates on that process to follow. A 2027 campaign will be announced in due course, with the 2028 Vendée Globe remaining the long-term target.
