The Vendée Globe: Why Sailing's Solo Circumnavigation Became the Sport's Definitive Test

The Vendée Globe starts and finishes in Les Sables-d'Olonne, a port town on France's Atlantic coast. The course is simple to describe: south down the Atlantic past Cape Finisterre, around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, past Cape Leeuwin at the southwestern corner of Australia, around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, and back north to France. The route crosses three Capes, passes through the Southern Ocean at latitudes below 40 degrees south, and covers approximately 24,000 nautical miles — around 44,000 kilometres.

Competitors sail alone. No crew, no resupply, no repairs from other boats or shore teams during the race. They sleep in short intervals, self-diagnose mechanical failures, navigate independently, and make every decision without input. The race has no set finish time; sailors finish when they arrive.

The Origin

The race was conceived by Philippe Jeantot, a French offshore sailor who had won the BOC Challenge — a solo round-the-world race with stops — in 1982–83 and 1986–87. His idea was a version without the stops. The first Vendée Globe ran in 1989–90; Titouan Lamazou won in 109 days, 8 hours and 48 minutes. The race immediately established itself as the extreme end of offshore sailing competition.

France's relationship with solo offshore racing — the course au large tradition — is specific and deep. The country produces most of the sport's top competitors, hosts the Figaro circuit (a training ground for professional offshore sailors), and has a cultural appetite for long-distance solo racing that is difficult to explain by reference to geography alone. The Vendée Globe is the apex of this tradition: the race most sailors in the system spend their career working toward.

The Southern Ocean

The Southern Ocean, which the race route crosses for the longest portion of its distance, is the dominant factor in a Vendée Globe campaign. Below 40 degrees south, the winds circle the globe uninterrupted by land. They generate large, fast-moving low-pressure systems that produce sustained 40–50 knot winds and waves of 10–15 metres. There are no ports. There is minimal rescue capability. The weather systems are more intense and more consistent than those encountered in any other ocean.

The sailor's relationship with these conditions — sailing fast enough to be competitive while managing the boat and their own physical state through weeks of Southern Ocean sailing — defines the race. Boats have capsized and sunk. Sailors have required rescue. In the 2008–09 edition, Yann Eliès was located and eventually rescued after breaking his leg aboard his stricken boat in the Southern Ocean — a coordinated operation across several days involving French maritime authorities and nearby shipping. Most of the Southern Ocean offers no such proximity to shipping lanes.

The IMOCA 60 is the boat class for the Vendée Globe — a 60-foot (18.3m) monohull with a canting keel, water ballast tanks, and in more recent editions, hydrofoils. The foiling revolution that transformed the format during the 2016–2020 design cycle is the most significant change in the race's history.

Early IMOCA 60s sailed at average speeds of 12–15 knots in good Southern Ocean conditions. Current-generation foiling IMOCA 60s routinely exceed 25–30 knots when foiling, reducing the circumnavigation time by weeks compared to the pre-foil era. Armel Le Cléac'h won the 2016–17 edition in 74 days, 3 hours, 35 minutes and 46 seconds — a record at the time — with Alex Thomson of Great Britain finishing approximately 16 hours behind in second, one of the closest top-two finishes in the race's history.

The 2024–25 edition, the 10th running of the race, saw the latest generation of foiling IMOCA 60s — lighter, more powerful, and more technically refined than the 2016 design generation — in full competition. Charlie Dalin, racing Macif Santé Prévoyance, won the edition in a time well below the previous record, as the foiling technology delivered the performance gains that the wider IMOCA programme had been developing across the preceding four-year cycle.

What the Race Actually Costs the Body

Competitors sleep approximately 20 minutes at a time in short shifts, accumulating perhaps four to five hours in any 24-hour period. The pattern holds for 70–80 days. Nutrition and physical recovery are managed without outside support; weight loss of 5–10 kg over the course of a campaign is commonly reported by finishers.

The muscular demands of sailing a 60-foot monohull are substantial. Adjusting sails, managing the boat's motion in heavy seas, conducting repairs, and physically managing the boat through squalls and high-pressure ridges is not a sedentary activity. Sailors prepare physically in the months before the race with specific conditioning programmes; the physical preparation element of a Vendée Globe campaign is closer to that of an elite endurance athlete than a recreational mariner.

The Campaign Structure

A Vendée Globe campaign takes four years and a significant budget — typically €4–8 million or more for competitive teams, depending on whether a new boat is built or a previous-generation IMOCA is purchased and upgraded. The campaign includes mandatory qualifier races: the Transat Jacques Vabre (a double-handed transatlantic run in odd years), the Route du Rhum (solo transatlantic, run in even years), and points events in the IMOCA Globe Series.

The qualification process is itself demanding. An IMOCA skipper who enters the Vendée Globe has already completed ocean miles in the thousands and raced competitively across multiple transatlantic and longer events. The race does not have first-timers in any meaningful sense; it has sailors for whom the Vendée Globe is the culmination of a decade or more of professional offshore development.

Watching the Race

The Les Sables-d'Olonne departure — scheduled for early November each edition — draws hundreds of thousands of spectators to the waterfront. The town is 90 minutes by train from Nantes and has direct rail connections across France. The combination of the coastal setting, the scale of the 60-foot boats visible in the harbour, and the immediate departure into the Atlantic makes it a direct spectator experience.

Throughout the race, a live tracker updated continuously is available online. Each boat's position, speed, heading, and the weather systems around the fleet are visible in real time. The tracker format makes it comprehensible to athletes from outside sailing: one person, one boat, the distance to go, and the Southern Ocean between them and the finish. The Vendée Globe does not require specialist sailing knowledge to follow. It requires only an understanding of what it means to be alone for three months in the most remote ocean on earth.