In 2018, the French skipper had lost his trimaran after captional caption of the Azores. This digital accident, it will be at the start of the 12th edition, whose departure is scheduled for Sunday.
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The Route du Rhum, Armel Le Cléac’h remembers it. He who has to set off on Sunday, November 6, from Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine) aboard the Maxi Banque Populaire-Xe, one of the eight boats in the Ultim class, remembers, he was going See departures on the pontoons with his parents. He remembers the third edition in 1986, and the disappearance of Loïc Caradec: he was 9 years old and had just started to compete in Optimist. He remembers, four years later, the arrival of Florence Arthaud as an event.
At 45, Armel Le Cléac’h also remembers, of course, the twice the Route du Rhum has refused to him. First in August 2014, it was a hand injury that forced him to give up. Then, during the next edition, in 2018, and while it is northeast of the Azores, it is the loss of Banque Populaire-IX. Today, he is not afraid to say: “It is the hardest sea that I had to live. I could not get out of it.” And also: “Understand What happened, to make sure that it was not me who had done bullshit allowed me to turn the page. “
Besides, once his responsibility has been discarded (the break -up before led, almost instantly, the colorful of the trimaran), his confidence recovered and renewed by the sponsor and after having discussed with his family, the Cléac ‘ H is ready to leave. It is his famous “it starts from there, it’s not over”, a well-known sentence from Pierre-Emmanuel Hérité, the technical director of Team Banque Populaire: “Armel shows an extraordinary tenacity. And, From the moment he sets an objective, he makes every effort to achieve it. It involves his physical preparation and his obsession – legitimate, even vital – to leave nothing to chance. “
“A playing card”
Known to trust his teams on the ground, Le Cléac’h knows, says and will again say, everything he owes to them. And recalls that this common story is a force. “Winning the Route du Rhum, the only big race I have never won, is a kid’s dream, but it would be for all of us a great story. And then, today, the sporting result is almost secondary: C ‘is the human adventure, the project, which now brings me. “The navigator affirms it by being well aware and where it (re) comes from – the shimmer of 2018 is a turning point in his career at sea – and that The competition will be tough: for him “Gitana [the team of Charles Caudrelier, who will be on the Maxi Edmond de Rotschild] is the competitor to beat”.
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