Alex Thomson Wants To Be Alone

• NEWS
• 09 Dec, 2005 12:20:00 PM

Alex Thomson Wants To Be Alone

At is an old adage. The Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race is a marathon, not a sprint round the buoys. There are six hundred miles of ocean looking for the weakest link in your boat, your crew, yourself.

At is an old adage.  The Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race is a marathon, not a sprint round the buoys.  There are six hundred miles of ocean looking for the weakest link in your boat, your crew, yourself.

But how do you say that to a man who seems to want to sprint all the time, even when the race goes all the way around the world.

British skipper Alex Thomson has a serious addiction to speed.  He also has a talent for it.

He first set the British sailing scene alight in 1998.  At just 25 years of age Thomson skippered the yacht Ariel to victory in the Clipper Round the World Race, becoming the youngest man ever to win a round the world event.  Arial dominated the race, winning 13 of its 16 stages.

In 2000 Thompson was at it again, winning the Round Britain and Ireland Race, smashing the record set by his former employer, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, by more than a day.

By 2003 he had his own Open 60, Sill Enterprises, setting a new 24-hour distance record for a single-handed monohull of 468 miles, averaging 19.5 knots throughout the day.

“The boundaries are there to be pushed and you get on and do it,” Thomson says.

“I didn’t know if the boat could do it but I knew I could.”

Now Alex Thomson is in Australia, for his second Rolex Sydney Hobart.

He was here in 2002, having founded the charter racing company Formula 1 Sailing that gave amateur sailors a chance to race alongside professionals in serious offshore events a year earlier.  On a chartered Farr 60, Thomson put together a crew of professional sailors and excited, starry-eyed British amateurs who had each paid thousands of pounds to fly half way round the world to climb their own personal Everest, the legendary Rolex Sydney Hobart.

“I had one guy in 2002, an Australian working in London who came over,” Thomson recalls. “I asked him where on the boat he wanted to work.  ‘On the bow with Bass Strait waves coming over me,’ he said.”

2002 was arguably the gentlest in the race’s history.   A cakewalk.  Thomson hopes things are a bit more exciting this year.

 
He concedes that Open 60’s don’t like going to windward much, they rate badly, (“these are as un IRC as you get”), and would need extraordinary conditions to give the more conventional IRC boats a run for their money on handicap.  But they are exhilarating and loads of fun when the wind picks up. 

“I can be in 25 knots of wind, doing 20 knots, and still stand in my cockpit drinking a cup of tea.  It’s ridiculous, “ he says.

There is no room for amateurs in the cramped Open 60 Hugo Boss either. 

This race is serious business, part of a preparation that will culminate in a new boat and the Vendee solo round the world race in 2008.

Thompson has committed to three circumnavigations over the next three years.  The VELUX 5 Oceans single-handed which begins in Bilbao in October 2006, the dual handed non-stop Barcelona World Race in 2007, and the Vendee in 2008.

“I love crew sailing,” he says.

“Taking amateur sailors out and seeing their faces when they see what its like to steer a boat doing 25 knots down a wave was fantastic. 

“These are the people who fund our sport.  But solo racing is such a huge challenge,” Thomson says.

“It as tough as hard shoes.

“Eighteen hundred people have climbed Mount Everest.  More than 400 have gone into space.  But only 80 have ever sailed around the world on their own.”

Hugo Boss and Alex Thomson will make their racing debut in Sydney in the Big Boat Challenge next Tuesday.