PIP’S DREAM

The Vendée Globe Race is the pinnacle of sporting achievement and human endurance that’s unequalled in any other field. Quite simply, there’s no other sporting discipline in which competitors are in full-on race mode, without a break, for three months.

The scale of the challenge is not to be underestimated – in the race’s 30-year history, only 66 people have completed the course, with a handful having successfully done so on three occasions. To put it in context, those 66 skippers represent little more than one per cent of the thousands that have summited Everest. Equally, nearly 10 times as many have orbited the planet in space. Just 10 of the successful Vendée Globe sailors are British and only five are women.

The IMOCA 60 Superbigou was originally built by Bernard Stamm for the 2000/1 Vendée Globe; he won two editions of the Around Alone solo round-the-world race with stopovers in her. Subsequently, Swiss sailor Alan Roura completed the