“The general public prefers brave heroes to winners steeped in quality”, skipper Sébastien Destremau tells the Vendée Globe differently

Documentaries, films, novels, beautiful books or comic strips, the legendary race around the world never ceases to stir the imagination and inspire authors and artists. A few hours before departure, we invite you to set sail with “Solitaires, a history of the Vendée Globe”, a book written by Sébastien Destremau and Théodore de Kerros, illustrated by Laurent Duvoux.

The Vendée Globe: 200 participants since its creation, 114 skippers having crossed the finish line, 28,000 nautical miles of racing on average, dozens and dozens of days at sea, sailboats worth several million euros, abandonments , capsizes, rescues, people missing at sea… and at the end of the race, at the end of the horizon, an extraordinary adventure, the Everest of the seas as we usually call it. Everything is said!

And among these skippers to have dared the adventure, Sébastien Destremau. Two Vendée Globes to his credit, one retirement in 2021 due to damage and an eighteenth position in the previous edition, in 2017, a journey that he retraces in his novel Alone in the world published by XO Éditions and adapted into a comic strip by Serge Fino at Éditions Glénat.

A jack of all trades, the skipper who now devotes himself to writing, theater, ecology and humanitarian work, could not let the tenth edition of the Vendée Globe pass without paying tribute to him. It’s done with Solitaires, A History of the Vendée Globea magnificent large-format Italian-style work in which the skipper, in the company of journalist Théodore de Kerros, looks back on the significant events of the race, on the men and women, skippers or others, who contributed to making it mythical.

Because every story has a beginning, this one opens with the Golden Globe Challenge (1968) and the Boc Challenge (1982) which imbued the spirit of adventure in the minds of a few, the sailors who are named Bernard Moitessier, Robin Knox-Johnston and even Philippe Jeantot, the creator of the Vendée Globe Challenge in 1989.

Page after page, the authors compile the little anecdotes of everyday life and the great tragedies, the hopes of some, the setbacks of others, the great technological innovations and life on board, the 40ᵉ roaring and 50ᵉ screaming, the Doldrums and Cape Horn, the solitude at sea and the crowds upon arrival at Les Sables d'Olonne… and the sailors of course, heroes, heroines, legends, Boissières, Lamazou, Chabaud , Crémer, Le Cam, Parlier and many others.

Texts, quotes, testimonies… and illustrations. Magnificent. A good fifty, most of them double-page spreads, all produced on computer. It is Laurent Duvoux whose signature you may have already seen in certain titles of the written press who stuck to it. Lonely with its large Italian format offered itself as an ideal playground for the illustrator who, surprisingly, did not know much about the world of sailing and in particular that of the Vendée Globe.

I didn't know anything about it but I immersed myself in the books, in the iconographic archives, in the news of the time

Laurent Duvoux

Illustrator

And this is precisely what interested him: “In my entire career, this is one of the projects I had the most fun with because it was a marathon. We had to keep the rhythm and each double-page spread addressed different subjects: the origins of the Vendée Globe , navigators, shipwrecks… I knew nothing about it but I immersed myself in the books, in the iconographic archives, in the news of the time.”

With a constraint that he had set himself: to offer a new angle!

“All the Vendée Globes, even the oldest, are very well documented. The navigators had cameras on their boats. The difficulty was to tell the story in images, but by moving the camera and telling myself that if it was to reproduce the GoPro installed on Peyron's boat when he was saving Poupon, it was basically reproducing an image that we all saw on the news, that we see again on every special broadcast on the Vendée Globe. It wasn't very. interesting ! The constraint I gave myself was to tell this story, but from a place where there was no camera.”.

Telling a story that ultimately everyone or almost everyone knows, but in a different way, is what apparently guided the three authors of this work released at the beginning of October by E/P/A. You will not find there a chronological and exhaustive history of the race, no more shattering revelations, but a sum of testimonies, technical information, figures, quotes, memories… and reflections on the mind and the future of the Vendée Globe.

Are today's sailors still adventurers or engineers at the helm of pharaonic budgets? And do sailing, the Vendée Globe, still deserve this image of a clean sport? These are also questions asked in this book, questions that are particularly close to the heart of the very committed Sébastien Destremau and to which he provides answers and solutions so that sailing around the world solo, non-stop, without assistance does not end. do not do without people and without the planet. And to remind in the back pages that “The general public prefers brave heroes to victors steeped in quality”.

Chronicles, interviews, reports… Follow the news of the ninth art on our dedicated blog The Best of Comics

Find us on our social networks and on france.tv