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Around the world in 42 days: frenchman sets new sailing record.

Scott Neuman

French skipper, François Gabart, waves aboard his 100-foot trimaran as he celebrates his world record off Brest harbor, western France, on Sunday. Thibault Camus/AP hide caption

French skipper, François Gabart, waves aboard his 100-foot trimaran as he celebrates his world record off Brest harbor, western France, on Sunday.

There is a new world record for sailing solo around the world : 42 days, 16 hours, 40 minutes and 35 seconds. If verified, it is more than 6 days faster than the previous record, set a year earlier.

Gabart reacts after his world record, in the Brest harbor, western France, on Sunday. Thibault Camus/AP hide caption

Gabart reacts after his world record, in the Brest harbor, western France, on Sunday.

French sailor François Gabart, aboard a 100-foot trimaran, set out on Nov. 4 to break the record held by countryman Thomas Coville. On Sunday, Gabart crossed the virtual finish between France's northwest tip and Lizard Point in southwest England at 0145 GMT before turning homeward to Brest in northwestern France.

He reportedly averaged 27.2 knots (31.3 mph) over 27,859.7 nautical miles.

Making such a journey is a difficult feat. It involves tackling the cold and stormy Southern Ocean that rings Antarctica, all the while tending a high-performance sailing vessel at the edge of its performance envelope.

After reaching Brest, Gabart, 34, said he was "aching all over."

"[It's] been like that for weeks, weeks since a proper sleep – I can hardly go on," he told reporters after making landfall at Brest.

"It was hard and I was on the very edge of things the whole time."

Exhausted or not, Gabart managed to share a bottle of champagne with his shore crew.

"It hasn't sunk in yet but I know it's a great time," he said.

Britain's Dame Ellen MacArthur won the title for fastest non-stop circumnavigation in 2005, but lost it to Francis Joyon of France. She regained it three years later.

Gabart's record must be verified by the World Sailing Speed Record Council , which will scrutinize his vessel's GPS data before signing off on the new record.

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Meet Donald Lawson, the Ambitious Sailor Who Aims to Break 15 World Records in the Next 5 Years

Lawson also plans to become the first american to solo circumnavigate the globe in 70 days aboard his fast ocean trimaran, defiant., jaclyn trop, jaclyn trop's most recent stories.

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At nine years old, Captain Donald Lawson recalls walking the marinas in Annapolis, asking anyone on the docks if he could give them a hand—cleaning boats, folding sails, or carrying gear back to the boathouse.

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“The captain of the Lady Maryland allowed me to steer the boat,” Lawson recalls. “I asked him how far I could take it, and he said, ‘Technically, you could sail it around the world.’ It was a real lightbulb, life-changing moment for me, and I started working toward that goal.”

More than three decades later, Lawson, 41, is gearing up to break from 15 to 18 world sailing records by 2028. “When you compete for a record, you are competing with the past, present and future,” he says. “For me, the only way I can show who I am and what I am is to succeed in these voyages.”

This fall, he’ll set out to become the first American—and, by extension, the first African-American—sailor to circumnavigate the globe solo in 70 days on a trimaran. He will be the fifth person to attempt such a feat—a groundbreaking goal for a sailor who had few African-American role models to look up to.

Sailing was not diverse in the 1990s. By the time Lawson set foot on his first schooner, only one African-American sailor, Teddy Seymour, had sailed the globe solo, completing a 16-month journey via the world’s canals in 1987.

“People took me in because they could see my passion and drive,” he says. “I had to learn to do everything on board just to get the opportunity to help out on the docks and sail.”

After high school, Lawson taught sailing to children at the Downtown Sailing Center in Baltimore. At the same time, he earned his racing chops crewing on raceboats in events like the Governor’s Cup in the Chesapeake Bay as well as local regattas. In the winter of 2005, Bruce Schwab, who had circumnavigated the world the previous year in his 60-foot yacht, Ocean Planet , invited Lawson out of the blue to come sailing with him in Portland, Maine.

The first night on the water, the pair were caught in a snowstorm. Ever the competitor, Schwab wanted to use the storm’s winds to increase boat speed, rather than seeking shelter in port. Lawson clearly liked that idea. “The boat could sail perfectly fine under autopilot,” Schwab told Outside Online . “But Donald was so thrilled to be there that he refused to come below, preferring to sit outside and drive the boat for hours, upwind, in the snow.”

It was that kind of mettle that is prompting Lawson to go after successive solo-speed records. But he has more than just glory in mind. Last year, he founded the Dark Seas Initiative, a non-profit organization with the aim to increase diversity in the sport by inspiring the next generation of sailors. Lawson also chairs the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee for US Sailing, the sport’s national governing body.

As part of its outreach, the Dark Seas Initiative will be broadcast into hundreds of classrooms as Lawson attempts to break his records. The cameras will record the often-grueling conditions to give a sense of the reality of offshore sailing. The goal is to reach young people who might never have considered sailing as a hobby, much less a profession.

“Sailing requires a boat, and when you are struggling to live, a boat is the last thing on your mind,” Lawson says. “Yacht Clubs have historically not been very inclusive to women or minorities, so what you have is an uncomfortable scenario where individuals are afraid to ask and the clubs don’t know how to be inclusive.”

Lawson acquired his pedigreed trimaran, Defiant, in April, likening it to the Formula 1 of boats for its speed and performance. Having started life as Groupama 2 , the French-built trimaran was launched in 2004, using the most advanced materials of that time. It was the last ORMA 60 produced, but won multiple races, including three years of Grand Prix titles and the 2007 Transat Jacques Vabre. The multihull got its new name from Lawson’s commitment to “defying the odds” and his favorite show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .

Lawson spent the first months along the California coast, visiting different yacht clubs and sailing centers, and even sailing into San Francisco Bay. He is now based in Acapulco, having put 6,000 nautical miles on Defiant.

“He’s an adventurer,” says Rich Jepsen, a board member of US Sailing. “Nobody does that much work without having an inner drive to do it—like the saying about summiting Everest, he’s doing it because it’s there. But he’s also turning his personal ambition into a proven model for doing good by inspiring the school children who watch him.”

Those first 6,000 miles have taken a toll. Recent images of Defiant in Acapulco show it looking the worse for wear, with visible hull and sail damage. Some sailing websites report the boat lost its engines. Lawson says the boat is being repaired locally and he plans to soon sail through the Panama Canal, up the Atlantic coast to his home port of Baltimore, where it will be hauled out. “It will undergo testing, modifications and upgrades for the upcoming record season,” he says.

The record-breaking attempts could start as early as next fall, with the Newport-Bermuda race. Lawson is going after the record held by his mentor Steve Fossett, who sailed the route in 1 day, 16 hours in 1999. “If time doesn’t allow for that, then the next record attempt would be the Around the World Voyage in October,” he says.

The campaign is then planned to continue through 2028.

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The Race to Break the Speed Record

• By Kimball Livingston
• Updated: October 26, 2021

If Alex Caizergues succeeds at breaking the speed sailing world record in 2022, it will be his third time around using a kite, but otherwise completely different from his first two records. Those marks—50.57 knots in 2008 and 54.10 in 2010—were set when foiling boards were continually upping the 500-meter mark, sometimes more than once a year. Caizergues’ 2010 run added 3 knots to what the famed trimaran L’Hydroptere had shown us only a year before. But all those efforts ran into cavitation trouble at about 52 knots, that point when flow over the foils boils into vapor—the point at which control vanishes. For his early records, Caizergues used a hydrofoil to lift him above the water. Now, with his Syroco team based in Marseille, France, he intends to use a hydrofoil to hold him down.

We’ll come back to that.

Nine years after Paul Larsen’s record run at 65.45 knots in Sailrocket , the French Syroco team has rivals in Switzerland following what they believe is a more conservative path. The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne is a public research facility where the speed quest caught fire with student engineers and professors, including some who helped develop L’Hydroptere back in the day. SP80 is the team name, taken from the goal of achieving 80 knots, a goal shared with Syroco. They have a kissing-cousin relationship, competition aside.

SP80 envisions hitting 80 knots with a kite pulling a surface-skimming trimaran. A subsurface superventilating foil counters the lift of the kite, and a mechanical interface aligns the forces. Syroco’s purified vision aims to put a kite in the air connected by wires to a pod also in the air carrying two “pilots.” That pod will have a single, tiny-as-possible connection to a supercavitating subsurface foil holding it down. The concept strips the speed problem to its barest fundamentals, exponentially raising the complexity of execution.

Neither concept would pass as a boat in Blue Blazerville. Both owe their origins to Bernard Smith’s book, The 40-Knot Sailboat , published in 1963 . Smith proposed a balance of opposing forces to avoid the ultimate instability that eventually and inevitably develops as power is added, and any ordinary craft will capsize. Sailrocket showed the way and validated the theory—using a canted wing, countered by a superventilating foil in the water. On November 24, 2012, with sponsorship money down to nickels and the weather window closing, Larsen clocked his 65.45-knot run at Walvis Bay, Namibia. These days, Larsen says he appreciates the respect shown by the principals of SP80 and Syroco when they call themselves “children of Sailrocket .” But when we keep this Australian-born Briton talking, we get to the part where he’s saying how the machine was packed away in a container in Namibia after just a few days of finally showing its potential, and there’s still gas in the tank and…

There’s nothing shaking right now, but don’t dismiss the current record holder, 49 years after the catamaran Crossbow set the first official 500-meter record at 26.30 knots. For bonus points, do you know how 500 meters became a standard record distance?

The simple answer: In 1972, when Crossbow was first contending at Weymouth, UK, that length fit the venue. If someone manages 80 knots in 2022, they will cover 500 meters in 12.15 seconds, a football field every 2.5 seconds.

Later, while we’re ­talking records, we’ll update the renovation of L’Hydroptere . First, let’s get up to speed on the essential terms. Supercavitation refers to a regime in which a small, highly loaded, wedge-shaped (­triangular profile) foil builds a stable vapor pocket that bypasses the limits of ­cavitation. Superventilation refers to the principle employed by Sailrocket , with a foil that encouraged ambient air pressure to travel down the entire length and span of the foil.

The SP80 team puts it this way: “A triangular profile allows air from the atmosphere to dive into the extrados side caught by the depression, forming a stable air bubble that will prevent ­cavitation inception.”

Got it? Hey, they’re engineers.

Caizergues is aiming for more than a speed record with his Syroco concept. He knows from experience that when you succeed, you’re done and, “It’s an empty feeling.” This time, he’s ambitiously building a scientific and technical company around Syroco with the aim of reducing carbon emissions in the transportation and energy sectors. Co-founder Olivier Taillard, a Mini-Transat veteran, relates: “We founded the company in 2019 and built a team of 20. That includes three Ph.D.s in physics. To date, we have created 12 innovations, with three in the market. One is a software tool now in use to maximize ­efficiency in shipping routes.”

Other developments are aimed at keeping that critical hydrofoil just barely under the surface of the water, doing its supercavitating thing. Under the rules of the World Sailing Speed Record Council, only ­mechanical systems are allowed. It can’t be computerized or fly-by-wire. To a pointed question about systems, Caizergues responds with a laugh and a cagey hint: “Because of the wire, we’ll have air coming down from the surface, so it’s going to be about managing ventilation along with employing the principles of supercavitation. Not a lot of work has been done in this area, so we’re leading the way.” Prototype testing began in summer 2021, with plans to go for the record in 2022. Alongside more sober developments aimed directly at the marketplace, the team calls this one “the moonshot.”

When these people talk to each other, they toss around stuff like “turbulent viscosity formula in the Standard K-Epsilon model.” It’s not “let it out till it luffs, then pull it in.” SP80 co-founder Mayeul van den Broek observes: “Like Sailrocket , both of the current record efforts are based on the concept of aligning opposed forces, but then you prioritize either efficiency, power or stability. Syroco chose ­efficiency as a top priority. We chose stability, which is why we are producing such a different realization of the same concept.”

The SP80 principals witnessed L’Hydroptere ’s stunning record run in 2009 and never quite got over it. Then, during a university competition to design the most efficient radio-controlled boat, they developed a hankering to try a superventilating foil on a kiteboard. When Benoit Gaudiot easily hit 41 knots, van den Broek says: “We saw that the rider was the weak link, and if we wanted to go faster, we would need a rigid link between the kite and the foil. Then, well, we might as well go for the record. We will use inflatable kites, even though a wing might be more efficient, because new-­generation kites will serve at 80 knots. We can be versatile, launching kites from 20 to 50 square meters for different conditions.”

Their superventilating foils, Gaudiot says, “will have water flowing on one side and air on the other. Sailrocket used similar superventilating foils. That is less efficient than a supercavitating foil generating vapor, but it’s a lot more stable. A superventilating foil at low speed will develop more drag than a conventional foil. At high speed, it has no limits.”

SP80′s link between airfoil and hydrofoil depends upon a module that is, “mechanical but automatic,” according to van den Broek. “It will be close to the controls of a conventional kite.” Gaudiot adds, “Having one line carry all the power allows you to know exactly where that power will be coming from, and you can advance it into the window ahead for best ­performance, like any kite.”

In theory, there is no ­heeling and no capsizing because the power of the kite is countered by the force of the foil. As with Syroco, 2022 is the target record date.

Last year, we wrote in these pages about an ambitious plan to rehab the 60-foot ­foiling trimaran L’Hydroptere and put the old girl to work as a point-to-point record hunter. Gabriel Terrasse and Chris Welsh partnered to buy the legendary campaigner, once left derelict in Hawaii. They patched it up and had it sailed to San Francisco, where it was taken apart with an intent to rebuild it better than ever. Work was well along when Welsh—who would have carried on with or without sponsorship—died suddenly, and all bets were off, save for Terrasse’s persistence.

“We’re looking for ­sponsors,” Terrasse says, “and we have engineers studying how to add ground effect to L’Hydroptere 2.0 along with new foils, a longer and lighter main hull, a wingsail, global aerodynamic optimization and much more. It was hard to lose Chris. We shared the dream. But L’Hydroptere has great potential to serve science and catalyze innovation.”

L’Hydroptere ’s 51.36-knot run in 2009 represented a last shot at setting speed records on water through pure muscle. Paul Larsen’s nine-year quest to solve the problem at a technical level culminated in that 65.45-knot run in 2012. Today the beast is still in a dark container in Namibia where Larsen packed it away. And yes, considering that Sailrocket had only a handful of runs in what turned out to be record-setting mode—fat foils, not thin foils, and according to the team’s VPP, 65 knots was a worst-case outcome; everything was structured to go 80 knots—it’s tempting to imagine putting Sailrocket 2 back on the track. What would change is the safety regime. It’s not hard to find videos online of early-­version Sailrocket 1 going aerial.

“In any future scenario, I’d want a roll cage and oxygen,” Larsen says, “and maybe I’m at a point where I’d be happy to see someone else sitting there.”

“Tell Paul he’s getting soft,” was the joking comeback from Richard Jenkins when I mentioned that to him. Jenkins holds the land-speed sailing record at 126.2 knots, which took him “only” 10 years of trying as his various iterations developed. As far as we know, no one is challenging that record today. Jenkins’ story speaks to the difficulty of these endeavors in any medium. He says: “I’m often asked if I would try to break the record again. If I had unlimited funding and built a new vehicle, based on my ­cumulative ­knowledge, it might take me five years or more, and then we’d probably see an increment of 1 or 2 percent. It takes being in the right place at the right time, with certified observers, which is hard to put together. You then have to be technically perfect, at the right moment, with virtually no testing because wind might come suddenly. It takes a great deal of time and experience—and then you shoot from the hip. I have better things to do.”

Running his company, Saildrone, for example, with which Jenkins does his own part to care for the planet by fielding autonomous surface vehicles for ocean research. Having built a kite-powered ­trimaran 20 years ago, Jenkins worries the Swiss are “barking up the wrong tree.” But technologies evolve, and 2022 bids to be a fascinating time. Of Syroco’s moonshot, Taillard says: “Half of our brain power is spent making it safe. If a foil breaks, or if it comes out of the water—which isn’t going to ­happen—all safety systems have to work perfectly.”

Caizergues, who will be in Syroco’s control pod with a co-pilot, adds: “One of the goals is to produce a craft that will be safe for me to drive. And to crash. Helmets, oxygen, padding, quick-release mechanisms for sure, and we’re not committed to air bags, but maybe.”

Syroco and SP80 intend to run in the south of France, where the Mistral roars down to the Med. It worked for L’Hydroptere , but these new efforts place ever more extreme demands upon managing the interface between air and water, which at sea level is 784 times the density of air. The world will be watching, and perhaps I speak for many when I say, “Gentlemen: May the alignments of force be with you.”

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Pool trick shot champion claims three records with back-breaking 48-hour marathon

A world champion pool trick shot artist has just added to his collection of Guinness World Records titles.

Florian “Venom” Kohler (France) earned his 12th world record by sinking the most pool trick shots completed in 48 hours – an incredible 1,816.

And he said it was the “most difficult” thing he’s ever done.

Florian, who now lives in Las Vegas, USA, with his wife Iana and 12-year-old daughter Chrissy, told us: “After a very successful 24-hour world record during COVID, I always entertained the idea of pushing the limits even further so the idea of the most pool trick shots in 48 hours came naturally. 

“Little did I realize how difficult it would be to actually complete this challenge.”

With five minutes of rest permitted for every hour of activity – as with all marathon record attempts – Florian had just four hours of rest time to spread over two full days.

He had 120 approved trick shots he could attempt and three goes at each one before he had to move on. And after he’d tried all 120, he had to go back to the beginning and repeat the process until the 48 hours were up.

The biggest issue he encountered was persistent back ache caused by bending over the table to retrieve the balls after every shot.

He started feeling pain in his lower back around the eighth hour, and by hour-18, someone had to pick up a back brace so he could continue.

And exhaustion really started setting in at the 32-hour mark.

He said: “From there it really was a mental and physical fight. My stroke as well as my legs were getting slower and on top of the lower back pain, I also started to get shoulder, neck pain, blisters and even burns on my fingertips. 

Nevertheless, I kept pushing until 4 a.m. the next day where I started to have mild hallucinations and disorientation.

At that point, Florian went off for a one-hour nap, and came back with nine hours still to go on the clock.

During the attempt, he walked 5 miles around the table, used over 5,000 balls, made 2,445 shots and successfully landed 1,816 of them.

He added: “I would like to again thank all my team for their effort in helping to complete the gruelling 48-hour record. It certainly was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.”

Florian also broke his own record for most pool trick shots completed in one hour , going up from 58 to 69, as well as his record for most pool trick shots completed in 24 hours , increasing his total from 753 to 1,185.

He did all three attempts simultaneously between 19 and 21 January.

On extending his 24-hour record, he said: “[It was] definitely unexpected. Because you can't really practise those kinds of long records. I was doing the practise on a small sample size of a couple hours or at most eight hours or so. 

“I was always close to the old record and usually over it, but not by much. I believe I just played some of my best pool during the record, the conditions were all met to perfection and what really allowed me to crush it was the fact that I tried to save as many breaks as possible because I knew the 48-hour one would be very difficult. So, I ended up minimizing the breaks as much as possible during [the first] 24-hours on top of playing at a very high level.”

Florian, who has been living in the USA for more than 10 years, took on his record attempts at the League Room in West Virgina, which he described as the “perfect location”.

He also streamed his record attempts live, and anyone who wants to check them out can see them on his YouTube channel , where he has 1 million subscribers.

Florian, 35, has been playing pool since he was 18 and has built a career out of his passion.

He’s a professional pool trick shot artist and is the current World Champion in his discipline. He also runs the largest pool league in Nevada with his wife – APA Las Vegas.

Despite being years behind many pros of the sport – with many top players starting to play when they were as young as three or four – Florian has completely mastered the art of the trick shot.

He received a mini pool table for his 18th birthday and started learning trick shots by watching videos on the internet.

Before long, he began inventing his own, and within two years, he was competing in trick shot competitions against pros who’d been playing longer than he’d been alive.

When it comes to picking his favourite trick shot, he admits that’s a “very tough question”.

“But if I had to pick only one it would be the Satellite Masse where you curve a ball around an obstacle using three rails,” he confessed.

And the one that gets the best reaction from a crowd?

Florian said: “Definitely the one I call the Nutcracker. I put a shoe in between someone's legs and shoot a cue ball directly into it.”

Just a few days after the success of his three record attempts, Florian went on to win at the WPA World Artistic Pool Championship.

Here are the other records that Florian holds:

• Highest one handed jump pot of a billiard ball – 50.8 cm

• Most pool balls potted into the middle pocket over an obstacle in one minute – 75

• Longest usable pool cue – 5.37 m (17 ft 7.4 in)

• Most pool balls potted one handed into the middle pocket over an obstacle in one minute – 48

• Most pool balls potted around a triangle in one minute – 21

• Farthest distance jump pot of a pool ball between two tables – 2.76 m (9.1 ft)

• Fastest time to jump pot 15 pool balls (US table) – 5.69 seconds

• Fastest time to jump pot 15 pool balls (US table), one-handed – 12.16 seconds

• Most clay sporting targets held between the legs broken by pool shot in one minute - 29

Want more? Follow us on Google News  and across our social media channels to stay up-to-date with all things Guinness World Records! You can find us on Facebook , Twitter/X , Instagram , Threads ,  TikTok , LinkedIn , and Snapchat Discover . Don't forget to check out our videos on YouTube  and become part of our group chat by following the Guinness World Records  WhatsApp channel . Still not had enough? Click here  to buy our latest book, filled to the brim with stories about our amazing record breakers.

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Round the world race: 100ft trimarans set for solo race

• Helen Fretter
• July 9, 2021

The fastest offshore racing designs ever built, the foiling 100ft Ultim trimarans, will go head-to-head in a solo round the world race in 2023

Photo: Yvan Zedda

The Ultim class has announced the first single-handed race round the world for giant multihulls , the Solo Ultim World Tour. 

This will likely be the most challenging ocean sailing race ever held. The solo skippers will need to navigate a course as arduous as the Vendée Globe , but will be doing so in 100ft foiling trimarans with complex appendages capable of sailing at 45 knots , with the ever-present risk of a split-second capsize.

Six of the fastest ocean-racing designs in the world will be taking part in the new solo race round the world, with record-breaking sailors Armel Le Cléac’h , Charles Caudrelier and Thomas Coville among the solo skippers lining up.

The Gitana entry Maxi Edmond de Rothschild is one of the most highly optimised big trimarans, and will be coming back into the Ultim class. Photo: Eloi Stichelbaut / PolaRYSE / Gitana

Unsurprisingly, the race has been a long-time in coming to fruition. Now called the Solo Ultim World Tour, it will be organised by the hugely experienced event company OC Sport Pen Duick, in collaboration with the Class Ultim 32/23, to start in the autumn of 2023. The concept was first mooted around 15 years ago, just as the notoriously skittish Orma trimarans were in their final days. A calendar was drawn up for the embryonic Ultime class which included solo and crewed round the world races, building up to a solo around the world race set for December 2019, then called the Brest Oceans. 

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Solo sailor Thomas Coville has pulverised one of the hardest records in sport: the single-handed round the world record. He…

However, in the 2018 Route du Rhum – the transatlantic race with a reputation for being something of a demolition derby – four of the big trimarans suffered severe damage. Armel le Cléac’h’s Banque Populaire IV capsized and broke up mid-Atlantic, while the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild lost 10m of one float, Sodebo also suffered structural cracking to one float and Macif lost a foil and a rudder. 

History seemed to be repeating itself – in the 2002 Route du Rhum, only three of 18 multihulls had managed to complete the race, and the ensuing capsizes and dramatic rescues saw many sponsors leave the Orma fleet. It was clear that the Ultim class was nowhere near ready to race solo around the world.

Macif at the start of the 2019 Brest Atlantiques Race

However, the class changed tack. A multi-stage double-handed race looping around the Atlantic was held in 2019 instead – the Brest Atlantiques . Although several boats suffered damage – Macif swopping out a rudder in Rio, and Sodebo breaking off its starboard rudder after hitting a whale (an impact which caused so much damage that the aft section of the starboard float filled with water and later also broke away), three of the four made it around and there were no dramatic rescues.

Round the world race entries

Even more remarkably, new boats kept being launched. Banque Populaire commissioned a new Ultim for le Cléac’h, and although Francois Gabart’s previous sponsor Macif pulled out mid-build, his new Ultim – code-named M101 – was completed, and he secured new backing from French cosmetics group Kresk (now under the name SVR-Lazatigue ). 

Combined with a new Sodebo for Thomas Coville in 2019, and a healthy market for second-hand giant trimarans that are ripe for optimisation, the biggest, and most audacious ocean racing fleet in the world is now attracting entry numbers to rival that of the last one-design Volvo Ocean Race (seven in the last Volvo, six currently in the Solo Ultim World Tour).

Confirmed entries for the round the world race so far are: Banque Populaire XI , skippered by Armel Le Cléac’h; Maxi Edmond de Rothschild with Charles Caudrelier (which will come back into the Ultim class after being modified out of class rules for round the world record attempts); Thomas Coville’s Sodebo;  Francois Gabart on his new SVR-Lazartigue ; Actual , skippered by Yves Le Blevec, and a Brest Ultim Sailing entry, the former Actual , with the skipper still to be announced. 

These sailors are the absolute elite of ocean racing. Between the five confirmed skippers alone they include two Vendée Globe winners, two around the world solo record holders, two Volvo Ocean Race wins , at least two Jules Verne around the world crewed records and multiple further attempts.

The start and finish host city has not yet been decided, although discussions are underway with the City of Brest, which has shown keen interest in hosting the event since the creation of the project and hosted the Brest Atlantiques Race in 2019.

Sodebo was one of three latest generation Ultimes racing in the 2019 Fastnet. Photo: Kurt Arrigo / Rolex

The current around the world multihull solo record stands at 42d 16h, set by Gabart on his previous Macif in 2017 . The Solo Ultim World Tour is likely to take around 40-50 days, as they will not be setting off with an optimal forecast for record-breaking.

However, the biggest question will be whether they can make it around without race-ending foil damage. After the experiences of the Brest Atlantiques Race and 2019 Route du Rhum, all the teams have been innovating with ways of both avoiding collisions, and making their trimarans more robust in the event of hitting a UFO.

The new Banque Populaire has increased structures, sacrificing ultimate light weight for strength (see more on this in the August issue of Yachting World magazine, out now). Sodebo has been experimenting with appendage fittings designed to absorb impact, and all the big tri’s are trialling collision avoidance systems such as Oscar to try and identify objects in the water.

Charles Caudrelier, the co-skipper of the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild who will be taking on the solo race, said: “This solo round-the-world race in the Ultim is a dream I didn’t even dare to hope for in my career. I have always been very drawn to the Vendée Globe, but here, at the helm of the fastest boats on the planet and in flying mode, it is quite simply the ultimate challenge. 

“Leading such a boat alone on such a demanding global course is an extraordinary adventure that I am really proud to share with the Gitana Team and on the Maxi Edmond de Rothschild. I have been thinking about this world tour for two years, it is this goal that motivates me and keeps me moving forward every day.”

The newly launched Banque Populaire XI

Thomas Coville, skipper of Sodebo Ultim 3 , commented: “It is a privilege to be part of this group of sailors. With Sodebo, we have been thinking about this race since 2007 when we launched the construction of the first Sodebo Ultim trimaran.

“There were a lot of twists and turns in the creation of this race around the world. This race justifies 20 years of commitment and high-level sailing. This is the race that will consecrate the life of an athlete and a sailor.”

Armel Le Cléac’h, Banque Populaire skipper added: “Our boats are magical, and I am happy that we can share them with the public around great adventures. I can’t wait for it to start!”

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