Alex Thomson: The sea is my playground
All I ever wanted to do as a child was to fly a helicopter, just like my father, who was a rescue pilot. But when I was 17, I went through a medical check-up, and the doctor told me that my eyesight was so poor that I wouldn’t even be able to serve in the navy. So I started doing what I knew and loved: giving windsurfing lessons and teaching children how to sail dinghies. Later, I decided to move a little further in my career and became a trainee at a yacht club, where my duties included scrubbing yachts, climbing masts, and cleaning toilets. But when I first found myself at the Fastnet Race, I realised what I truly wanted to do.
I began my sailing career with windsurfing. I first stepped onto a board with a sail at the age of 11. Five years ago, for the first time in my life, I got into an Optimist-class dinghy with children on Lake Geneva—and came in last.
The Vendée Globe is a very simple race: you leave France, turn left, round Africa, turn left, sail along Antarctica to South America, turn left again, and return to France.
At the start of a regatta, the most important thing is not to collide with anyone. That’s why I start last and cross the starting line a minute after the signal. In the scale of the race, it doesn’t matter how well you start; what matters is not ruining everything right at the beginning.
I hardly steer the boat by hand at all. The autopilot holds the course for me. What’s far more important is constantly adjusting the sails to sail as fast as possible. This is what I am busy with most of the time.
Foils have changed our sport dramatically. In the past, with a 20-knot wind on flat water and a full course, we would sail at 19–20 knots. Now we can reach 28–29. As the wind strengthens, the yacht accelerates and the foil starts working even more—I call it power on demand. During the Vendée Globe, the highest speed I managed to reach exceeded 37 knots.
I have to be able to sew. I also have to be a helmsman, a bowman, fix the electrics, and do absolutely everything that might be needed on a yacht. And all of that suits me perfectly. When you find something you truly enjoy, work starts to bring pleasure, and you get better and better at it.
Actually I came to ocean racing by accident. But that feeling familiar to all sailors—when you sail away from the shore and suddenly realise how small and fragile we are—has always amazed and stirred me.
A solo race lasting 90 days is a huge test of self-discipline. Mental and psychological preparation is far more important here than physical fitness. Over the past four years, I’ve spent more time training my mind than working with sails or doing strength training.
When you sleep during the race, you lose speed. You have to sleep in short bursts—on average, about 20 minutes every two hours. I start preparing for this regime several weeks before the start of the race to tune myself into a “combat” body clock. Although during the first three days of the race, I don’t sleep at all.
How do you avoid going mad from loneliness in the ocean? You have to separate loneliness from isolation. You can be surrounded by crowds of people and still feel lonely. I have a beautiful wife and two wonderful children—how could I be lonely? It’s all about your perspective. That old glass-half-full or glass-half-empty idea. You choose how to relate to things. I look at everything positively, and that sustains my motivation.
From the outside, 90 days seems like an eternity. But for me, they flew by so quickly that I can hardly remember even 5% of what happened during that time.
The simplest way to achieve success is to be happy. If you convince yourself that you are happy, you are more likely to succeed. And it’s not as difficult as it sounds. One way to improve your mental state is to set goals and achieve them. They don’t have to be something grand. When, 12 days after the start of the Vendée Globe, my yacht lost one of its foils, I was devastated. Damn it, I had spent four years of my life preparing for this race, and it had all gone to pieces! How do you keep your motivation in a situation like that? I forgot about the main goal and focused on smaller ones. I ate and fixed some minor issues. It took 30–40 minutes, and I felt better. After that, I was able to move on to more complex tasks.
My boat took 45,000 man-hours to build and cost €5 million. We spent all that money, and I still don’t understand why, instead of a proper toilet, we just have a bucket on board. When nature calls in the middle of the ocean, you go down into the cockpit, take off your jacket, your outer suit, then the inner jacket and inner trousers—and you still have five layers of thermal underwear to go. You take them off and think you’ve won. And when you finally sit down on the toilet without all that pile of clothing, do you know what happens? The wind starts blowing. The yacht heels, and things get complicated. I told my team about this problem—they made a special bucket for me. And so far, it’s the most expensive bucket in the world.
When I’m in the open ocean, I don’t listen to music. For the Vendée Globe, I didn’t take a single track or album with me. The boat spoke to me—I had to listen to it. The first sign of any problem is a strange sound or an unusual sensation on the boat. If my ears had been occupied with music, I might not have heard in time that something was going wrong.
My boat is special. It’s the product of the work of a huge number of people. This boat allows me to compete and set records. I was forced to abandon my first Hugo Boss on a life raft somewhere between Africa and Australia, and the first thing I told my psychotherapist was that I felt deep frustration, because that boat had already become a part of me.
The partnership with Hugo Boss began 15 years ago. Imagine this: Hugo Boss headquarters in Stuttgart, far from the sea, and none of the company’s top managers are sailors. Working with Hugo Boss, we compete with sports like golf and motor racing, and for 15 years now we’ve been proving that sailing can be commercially successful, justify investment, and bring dividends to our partner.
The idea of a keel walk came from Tiger Woods. One day, the team and I saw a video where he was showing golf tricks. It had 50,000 views on YouTube. “Cool,” we thought, “let’s make a video with some kind of trick too and get our 50,000 views.” But within a week, a million people had watched it. Hugo Boss was very pleased.
Once, in the Southern Ocean, while I was asleep, the wind shifted and the yacht heeled onto its side. I jumped out of the cabin, looked up at the mast, and saw that the light on it was blinking. A crazy idea immediately crossed my mind: if I walked all the way up to the top of the mast, I could change the bulb. It wasn’t the smartest thought, of course, but that’s how the trick known as the mast walk was born. All these videos appeal to a broad audience, not just sailors. If a million people watch a video and even 1% of them take up sailing, we can consider it a victory.
My wife and I agreed that the 2016–2017 Vendée Globe would be the last one of my career.
And of course, at the press conference after the finish, the first question was whether I would take part in the race again. My wife then said that it would be wrong to come third, then second, and not at least try to win. To win, you need money and time—but most importantly, people. And that is exactly the challenge we are working on now. We are looking for resources and building a team of people who will move together towards the goal of becoming the first non-French team to win the Vendée Globe.
Why do I do this? More than 4,000 people have climbed Everest. Around 700 have been to outer space. And fewer than 100 have sailed around the world alone. It’s a challenge. Fighting for results and staying focused and concentrated 24 hours a day for three months—that suits my nature. And they give me millions of euros for the best toy a boy could ever dream of.
