Desjoyeaux

The morning after the night before, Ed Gorman reflects on the man who won the Vendee Globe

Michel Desjoyeaux was remarkably composed when he came ashore at Les Sables d'Olonne after winning the Vendee Globe and smashing the existing record by 12 days, 16 hours and 33 minutes, completing the 4,000-mile voyage in just 93 days, three hours and 57 minutes.

He arrived in a cavalcade of support craft on Saturday night with spotlights illuminating PRB's rig and fireworks drumming in his ears, as thousands of his French supporters came out on a cold and damp evening to welcome him home.

Apart from the tell-tale red rims round his eyes, the man looked as if he might have been out for a day-sail. He was relaxed and happy as he sprayed the waiting television crews with champagne and tried to answer a barrage of questions.

When he finally emerged into the main tent where he took the stage alone for his post-race press-conference, the 150-or so assembled journalists burst into spontaneous applause as he sat running his hands through his hair. "Bon", he said quietly to himself as we clapped and whistled.

The composure cracked only once, and it was later in the same press conference, when again the audience applauded the PRB skipper. As the clapping went on and on, he finally buried his head in his hands with tears in his eyes.

As expected, Desjoyeaux's race was not quite as smooth and incident-free as he perhaps led us to believe. It was clear from his detailed recollection that the burn-out on his starter-motor was a moment which caused him great anguish until he found a way of overcoming the problem using pulleys and blocks attached to the boom. A perfectionist and a highly technical sailor, he said he was furious with himself for having made the basic preparation-error that, at that stage, threatened his race.

In other ways PRB did not emerge from her ordeal completely unscathed. Desjoyeaux had to replace a fairly lengthy section of mast-track just above halfway up the mast and there was considerable damage to stanchions both around the unique circular traveller track and just aft of the bow on the port side. The masthead wind instrument unit was missing and there was also some sail damage but little else was immediately obvious.

Desjoyeaux was highly complementary about Ellen. He said she was a mystery to him and he repeatedly made the point that he could not believe she had come so far in such a short time in the sport. "I don't know what I've been doing for the past 10 years," he said, adding that she gave him a run for his money right up to the end.

Desjoyeaux also made a very interesting point about Parlier. He said that, back in the Southern Indian Ocean when Parlier was hammering his boat and covering 50 miles-a-day more than him as he sought to catch-up having lost the lead, Desjoyeaux decided to let the Aquitaine Innovations skipper overtake him. In the event, and almost as predicted by Desjoyeaux, Parlier pushed it too hard and his rig came down.

At the press conference, Desjoyeaux made no bones about this. He said he explained his tactics and why he was deliberately sailing two knots slower than Parlier in an e-mail to his sponsors from the boat at the time, and that he felt vindicated by what had happened. He said this was why his boat was now tied up alongside in Les Sables with its mast still in it and why Parlier's was not. There was nothing triumphalist about the way he put it, it was just a matter-of-fact and honest assessment by a man who has a highly-developed sense of where the boundary lies between racing and preserving his boat.

As far as the record goes, he said he believed even his time could be bettered. The key to the huge margin by which he broke Christophe Auguin's previous mark of 105 days, was in the closeness of the race plus the advances in the new generation of Open 60s. Considering what one man - or woman for that matter - has now achieved in an Open 60, one can only reflect again how strange the Volvo Ocean Race is going to seem with 12 crew running a boat of the same length, albeit of very different design, and taking nine months to get round the planet.

Desjoyeaux has won just about everything there is in solo sailing but he remains a modest man. "I want to thank all the guys who have come here to welcome me tonight," he told us, "and I hope you will do the same for all the other skippers right to the end, as the last one deserves the most honour for being at sea the longest."