For the first time in its history, the Vendée Globe will see three boats helmed by Swiss sail around the world.
The Genevans Justine Mettraux and Alan Roura as well as the Zuricher Oliver Heer will be on the starting line, Sunday at 1:02 p.m., in Les Sables-d’Olonne (France), among the 40 competitors entered.
Since the first edition, in 1989, only four Swiss sailors have started the event: twice for the Franco-Swiss Bernard Gallay, four times for the Genevan Dominique Wavre, three times for the Vaudois Bernard Stamm and the two Roura races. This shows that this triple presence is a small event.
The most experienced of them is therefore Alan Roura. The 31-year-old from Geneva, who now lives in Lorient, will embark on his third Vendée Globe aboard his boat “Hublot”. He took 12th place in 2017 aboard the first “La Fabrique” and, on the second, he finished 17th in 2021.
This year, he intends to do better, even if it means risking everything, as he says in the “Tribune de Genève”: “I have already completed two Vendées. I don’t want to just finish a third and have that finisher label and that’s it. No, I would rather have to abandon at Cape Town with a boat bent in two because I would have pulled on it too much rather than continue at all costs while keeping some under my feet.”
For the 38-year-old Genevan, this will be a first. But the skipper of “TeamWork-Team Snef” is not inexperienced. In the Imoca category, these fast boats that “fly” on foils, the one that the sailing world nicknames “the machine” took 7th place in the Route du Rhum in 2022 and finished 6th in the Transat Jacques Vabre in 2023.
In this Vendée Globe, she is a serious outsider. In the columns of “La Côte”, she admits to being happy to be at the start: “After all this work to set up the project and qualify, it is a great satisfaction to see it come to fruition.”
Finally, Oliver Heer, aboard “Tut Gut”, is also taking part in his first Vendée Globe. He is not making this solo trip around the world with the same boat as his compatriots. The 36-year-old from Zurich sails on an older generation boat, without foils.
We will know in a little less than three months – the record has been held by Frenchman Armel Le Cléac’h since 2017 (74 days, 3 hours, 35 minutes and 36 seconds) – if one of the three Swiss will enter the history of this legendary offshore race.
