Yoann Richomme reflects on his first Vendée Globe

Yoann Richomme, skipper de PAPREC ARKÉA © Jean-Louis Carli / Alea

"It was fantastic, it was wonderful. This is a great moment and I was happy to have waited a little bit (before the finish), so that yesterday was Charlie's day and today is mine.

"I am not interested in collecting trophies - they always end up on a dusty shelf or in a container so that's not what motivates me. I'm still asking myself what does motivate and I haven't identified it.

"I want to continue to progress, to go forward and to have fun in what I'm doing. This is what pushes me to continue and the passion of course, the passion of fine tuning the boats. It's not just the regatta that pleases me, it's everything that's around the team. Building the team, creating the concept of the boat, building the boat. And also trying to push to give my best to get the best results - that's the case today and maybe another time I can do even better."

Vendée Globe: What stimulated you the most, the fight with Charlie or pushing your boat as hard as possible?

Yoann Richomme: "It's more wanting to hand in a good paper, to do a good job. If you take the example of the comeback I managed to do between the Indian and the Pacific, I was not completely obsessed. I was not telling myself I had to catch up with the first boat - I was trying to hand in the best paper I could and then let the scenario decide the result. In that case, I had a big leap on the ranking and in terms of miles.

"I'm not a pit bull for looking for a bone and when Charlie overtook me I knew that I would not finish first. I was happy to finish second - the advantage is that it maybe leaves some space for another time, if there is one."

Vendée Globe: What have you learned about yourself on your first Vendée Globe?

Yoann Richomme: "I felt in control from A to Z and did not have the feeling of a revolution in what I knew about myself. What did surprise me, I think, is that I almost enjoyed the duration of the race. Solo racing is not as fun for me as double handed and crewed, but it's the format that's most practiced in France.

"I took some pleasure in life on board. It's an interesting race because there's a lot of changes of pace. There are different passages, you change oceans, so it splits it into several parts.

"I think I started with a good mindset, (but) I was quite surprised to enjoy the race. I was a little bit afraid and I was prepared to not appreciate the long duration and it was actually the opposite. It was hard mentally until the end of the third week, after the sprint down the South Atlantic, which was particularly difficult.

"What surprised me most is the number of the changes in the rankings - it was incredible. I thought I was very far away at Cape Finisterre, but then I had a descent that was amazing and I was first at Madeira. Then it was changed again withSam (Goodchild) and Thomas (Ruyant) leading. We thought they would escape in the South Atlantic but in the end we overtook them.

"When we started the return and Charlie passed Cape Horn nine minutes after me, I told myself it wouldn't be easy, because his machine is more at ease in the transitions and in the average winds of the ascent in the Atlantic. But that'snot only the reason he overtook me. At the cold front off Rio de Janeiro, I was not as comfortable as him and I was very tired at that time."

Vendée Globe: What were your best and worst moments?

Yoann Richomme: "The worst moments? There aren't that many. Getting a rhythm that supports morale is important. After three or four days of the sprint down the south Atlantic that lasted about a week it was difficult to continue pushing all the time. But you know that if you give up at that moment you'll be out of the top five immediately.

"I think that was the most difficult part, because technically speaking I don't have any problems with the boat. There wasno point where it was terrible for me because I had broken something.

"The moment Charlie discovered the crack in his boat is when I pulled back a little bit, because I was afraid of breaking the machine. I was therefore not far from being right, but he was pushing more than ever and maybe the boat suffered at that point. I think those are the real difficult moments.

"Sometimes it was a little bit more difficult on the legs when I lost the hope of coming back. When I was behind in the Indian Ocean and I knew that I wouldn't be able to come back to his level. My objective changed at that point - the priority was then to finish in third place. So I needed to escape from Thomas Ruyant as much as possible and that was the only goal. Then the weather system between Tasmania and New Zealand made it possible for me to come back into the leading group. But if I finished third, I would also have been happy.

"There were some difficult moments, but I don't think I ever really collapsed. We had tools that we had worked on for mental preparation, but I never used them. So it must have been quite good in the end."

Vendée Globe: Was the big depression south of the Kerguelen Islands a turning point in the race?

Yoann Richomme: "We cannot summarise this Vendée Globe into this one event. The descent of the Atlantic was more important because the three of us were already far ahead and Thomas, who is usually in this group, was left behind. We already had a big advantage at the Kerguelens and then there was a separation between the two of them and me because we didn't take the same decision for the depression. But in the end it had little importance because I came back to them and the group behind was quite distant."

Vendée Globe: The Vendée Globe is also about travel. Did you live that aspect well?

Yoann Richomme: "Yes, it was very important for me because I was afraid of not seeing anything and not seeing any islands. It began with Madeira, but then I saw nothing before the Auckland Islands (south of New Zealand) but that was part of my personal voyage. It was part of the dream to take the time to use nautical skills to discover the world and travel in a different way.

"I also had a podcast and read several stories of travels and discoveries. It was an interesting trip because when you are in those areas, you have a little bit of time - I'm not always focused permanently on the boat. So I went to Wikipedia, I read about different explorers and made other little discoveries - it all was part of the voyage."

Vendée Globe: Yesterday Charlie said that you had entered his mind and at some point he told himself, 'I must become Charlie Dalin again to win'. Did you have Charlie in your head also?

Yoann Richomme: "No, I don't think so, but I do understand what he's saying. I navigate without pressure. It doesn't disturb me, more than a little, if one boat or another is nearby. Of course if, for example, you have Jérémie (Beyou) nearby, you don't tell yourself it's going to be easy. You tell yourself it's going to be really hard. With Charlie it's the same. You know that it's going to be hard and that Charlie will be stuck next to you for a long time.

"I am able to understand how he thinks - I can almost tell you his trajectories without doing routings for him. It gives you a headache if you think too much about the others. You must stay really focussed in your head, otherwise you can be influenced by almost anything. If you check each ranking and see that he has gone faster than you in the last four hours, it becomes impossible. You must not get influenced too much by the rest.

"Your own ability to calculate your optimal route, know where you are going and how to get there puts you at quite a high level. To take an example, if you don't have accurate speed polars, then you can't calculate your route perfectly, so you rely too much on other boats to show where you must go. It's not easy - that's why data analysis has so much impact in the end. Mental resilience is helped by many other things that are worked ahead of time.

"There was a depression before entering the cold front off Cape Frio, where the sea was rather choppy. Maybe I didn't manage it well, or had too much power, so I didn't rest. Then when I reached the cold front, I was exhausted. We will never know exactly what happened in this cold front, but I didn't do very well. We took different routes and I lost hundreds of miles. After that conditions that did not give me an advantage, so I rested quite a lot because I could not pull more performance out of the boat."

Vendée Globe: What message would you like to give all the children who watched your race?

Yoann Richomme: "It's wonderful - this whole thing is amazing. I don't know how many schools were following the race, but when I visited one deep inland, where one of my cousins is a teacher, the whole classroom was decorated for the Vendée Globe - all the walls were covered.

"I realised the power of this - it's wonderful because there's a motivation that comes out of this event. You want to tell these kids to live their dreams, because that's what I was able to do. I am able to live from a passion more than a dream and I hope that many of them will find their own passion that they are able to live from."

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