Only Manu Cousin remains at sea in the Vendée Arctique, but the race has delivered exactly what it promised: a compressed vision of the Vendée Globe, complete with punishing conditions, rapid weather shifts, genuine tactical warfare and suspense that lasted until the final miles.
The skippers themselves are the best witnesses to what they’ve experienced. Sam Goodchild was the first of nine to cross the Arctic Circle on 11 June, and he didn’t mince words about it. “I feel like I’m living a mini-Vendée Globe condensed,” the Franco-British MACIF Santé Prévoyance skipper said as he turned south toward Les Sables d’Olonne. He outlined the parallels plainly: the shifting conditions, the relentless cold water, perpetual humidity, and those stretches when you have to ease off to keep the boat intact.
Only four of the nine starters have actually sailed a Vendée Globe: Goodchild, Violette Dorange, Arnaud Boissières and Manu Cousin. That shared experience gave them a particular lens. Boissières drew a direct line between the Arctic waters he’d just crossed and the Southern Ocean. “The atmosphere reminds you of the high southern latitudes,” he explained. “There are these distinctive light qualities, weather that changes constantly, and humidity that never leaves you.” Cousin used simpler language: “something of the Grand Sud”—the deep southern seas. It was the feeling, he said, as much as the facts.
Dorange, who finished at the weekend, told those waiting on the pontoons she’d nearly completed a small circumnavigation. “So much happened,” she said. “Multiple gales, intense the whole way through.” But her real assessment came mid-race, when she confessed to reporters that she’d brought podcasts and a book—and never touched them. “I realised how gripping this race truly is,” she said. “Between the manoeuvres, the strategy, the boat management, I’m occupied every minute. And it absolutely grips you.”
That’s the unvarnished truth the Vendée Arctique delivered. It wasn’t a simulation. For these sailors, it was the real thing, compressed and brutal, a genuine test of what a Vendée Globe demands.
