At 29, Tom Laperche has sailed SVR-Lazartigue solo from Saint-Malo to Guadeloupe in a record 6 days 13 hours, leading from Cap Fréhel and beating the 2022 mark by over six hours.
Most of us who have taken a yacht out of Saint-Malo have spent the first few hours worrying about the tide over the rocks off the Rance and wondering whether the crêperie will still be open when we get back, so it is a little humbling to learn that Tom Laperche took the lead off Cap Fréhel within hours of the start on 1 November and simply never gave it back. The 29-year-old crossed the finish line off Pointe-à-Pitre at 22:31:40 local time on Saturday 7 November, which was 03:31:40 on Sunday morning in Paris, after 6 days, 13 hours, 27 minutes and 40 seconds alone aboard the Ultim trimaran SVR-Lazartigue, and in doing so set a new record for what the organisers rather grandly, and not unreasonably, call the most prestigious ocean sprint of them all.
The figures published by the race organisers are the sort that make a cruising sailor reach for a calculator and then put it down again in mild despair. The theoretical course between Saint-Malo and Pointe-à-Pitre is 3,542 miles, but Laperche actually sailed 4,308.32 miles, at an average of 27.18 knots through the water and 22.27 knots along the great circle route, and he improved on the record set in 2022 by Charles Caudrelier aboard Gitana 17 by 6 hours, 19 minutes and 45 seconds. That works out at more than 650 miles a day for six and a half days, single-handed, at night as well as by day, on a boat that spends much of its time flying above the water on its foils, which is further each day than most of us manage in an entire summer of Solent weekends.
It also places him in rather distinguished company, because the organisers point out that he is only the third skipper under 30 to win the race, after Laurent Bourgnon, who was 28 when he won in 1994, and Marc Pajot, who was 29 in 1982. The family background reads like something a novelist would reject as too neat, with a grandfather who sailed, a father, Philippe, who is a dentist and has competed in the Route du Rhum himself as an amateur, and family friends called Bourgnon and Coville, while Laperche was taken sailing at the age of eight aboard Thomas Coville’s ORMA trimaran, won the Solitaire du Figaro in 2022 at 25 and then sailed with François Gabart and Franck Cammas on SVR-Lazartigue, a journey that included retiring from the Arkéa Ultim Challenge-Brest in 2024 before arriving at the top of the sport.
The race was not all champagne and trade winds, however, and the most frightening moment came in the early hours of Wednesday 4 November, when Armel Le Cléac’h, who had been neck and neck with Laperche aboard Maxi Banque Populaire XI, capsized about 550 nautical miles north-west of the Azores. In a statement released through the race, Le Cléac’h said he had already reduced sail when what his team later told him was a 40-knot gust laid the boat on its side almost instantly in the dark, and that even the anti-capsize systems could not compensate; he got inside the central hull, set off his distress beacon, put on his survival suit and waited for the cargo ship Palexpo, whose crew, he said, had never before rescued anyone on the open sea and needed several attempts in rough water before hauling him aboard on a rope.
Behind Laperche, the old guard put up a gloriously stubborn fight, with Thomas Coville bringing Sodebo Ultim 3 home in second place on the Sunday afternoon in an elapsed time of 7 days, 4 hours, 40 minutes and 5 seconds, 15 hours, 12 minutes and 25 seconds after the winner. The organisers note that at 58 this was Coville’s eighth consecutive Route du Rhum and his sixth podium, achieved despite losing his big gennaker, serving a 45-minute penalty for a broken seal on his propeller shaft and finishing with damage to both foils, while Louis Burton, who has moved across from the IMOCA class, completed the Ultim podium in third aboard Armand Thiery on his debut in the giant trimarans.
For those of us who will never sail anything faster than a well-tuned club racer, the Route du Rhum remains one of the great spectator events in sailing, and the start in Saint-Malo every four years is well worth the crossing from the South Coast for anyone with a boat and a few days to spare. All of these results are, as the organisers carefully remind everyone, subject to jury review, and the rest of the fleet is still making its way across the Atlantic, but nobody seriously expects the record to be taken away from a young man who led from the first headland to the last.
