Don McIntyre is on relaxed form when he calls from Les Sables d’Olonne. His current flock of round the world racers are swooping south on the second leg of the Ocean Globe Race, McIntyre’s 50th anniversary homage to the Whitbread Around the World Race. Conditions were good, and the crews had been revelling in their first taste of Southern Ocean swells. It’s a lifelong ambition made real for those who dreamt of taking part in the original iconic races.
The Ocean Globe Race (OGR) is also something of an apotheosis of McIntyre’s 50-year career. His life story is all about creating adventures, but this is an adventure made accessible. It’s something that ‘normal’ people could do. Don McIntyre sees that as the reason so many sailors – 160 crew in the OGR so far, 24 solo skippers in two editions of the Golden Globe Race (GGR) – have signed up for his new breed of ocean races.
“I consider myself to be very normal. Some people think I’m an arsehole, others will think I’m a genius, but I’m very normal. So if it’s something that I’d like to do, I’m sure there are other people that want to do it too,” he muses.
But though McIntyre might see himself as an everyman, he has not lived a ‘normal’ life. Racing solo around the world is enough isolation for most, but Don followed it up by deliberately stranding himself on Antarctica for a year. His stories are peppered with sentences like “And then I learnt how to fly a helicopter”, or “We had some pirate interaction – so I got off the boat and instead took up rally car racing.”
It’s a delivery that will be familiar to followers of his daily race video updates – genial, with a slightly homespun air that’s at odds with the slick production values of most sailing events
