[Un jour en mer] Vendée Globe: the gaze of the crowd

A few weeks ago, I witnessed an astonishing spectacle: a lone man on stage recounting “The Long Road” by Bernard Moitessier. A sailing trip around the world in a theater. A feat signed by Thierry Lavat, and I wonder, today, if this actor-author would be capable of inventing a play on the Vendée Globe 2024.

However, Moitessier admired offshore racers and was fascinated by the technical capabilities of their sailboats. But it was the era he was wary of. The one that encourages us to always go faster, to always do “better”, whatever the cost. He who wrote “something lifts me above myself, I hear the sea singing, the wind, the sun, the bow rainbow, the long phosphorescent hair of the wake strewn with stars where the bum of the ports becomes a prince of the horizon in a freedom that no money will ever buy.”

In a race like the Vendée Globe, freedom is relative: there are sponsors to satisfy, media to please… An enormous weight, which adds to the difficulty of sailing in machines doped with foils, with such violent movements that many live there in helmets. We are far from Moitessier’s Joshua, an ideal compromise between the safe and the submarine, which traveled at an average of 4.65 knots… He sought to “totally forget the Earth, its pitiless cities, its indifferent crowds and its thirst for a meaningless rhythm of existence.”

Today, a Vendée Globe competitor is connected to the world via satellites and social networks. Moitessier’s solitude is a luxury that is forbidden to him. And that he probably doesn’t want: he left Les Sables-d’Olonne applauded by a crowd, he hopes to find her on his return. And she looks at him.