Emerging relieved and happy out of a dark, windy night off Les Sables d’Olonne, Jérémie Beyou crossed the finish line of his fifth Vendée Globe this morning at 00:58 (UTC) to take fourth place from the record fleet of 40 starters. The elapsed time for the 48 year old skipper of Charal is 74 days, 12 hours, 56 minutes and 54 seconds and he finishes 9 days and 17h behind race winner Charlie Dalin (MACIF Santé Prévoyance).
Although he was tipped as one of the favourites, fourth place is an excellent, very hard-won result for Beyou who on the descent down the Atlantic in light winds did not manage to get himself in the match with the very top group and then was never quite able to find an option to catch up with the top trio from the Indian Ocean onwards.
The Big South favoured the leaders on a rich-get-richer course and Beyou found himself fighting hard to lead a very tightly matched peloton against many top, talented peers who he has known and raced against since his days in La Soltaire du Figaro which he has won three times.
Indeed against such a strong, competitive field Beyou’s fourth today is not the result he was looking for but in this remarkable field it is probably almost equivalent to the best Vendée Globe result of his career, third behind winner Armel Le Cléac’h and runner up Alex Thomson in 2016-17.
For certain it exorcises the ghosts of his 2020 race on which he had to restart from Les Sables d’Olonne nine days after the start with a deficit of 2,700 miles to the leader at the time Briton Alex Thomson, going on to finish 13th.
Beyou’s programme has been one of the benchmarks of the quadrennial and he has been consistently on the podium since launching his Sam Manuard design in July 2022, finishing third in the Route du Rhum, fourth on the Transat Jacques Vabre, second on the Retour à La Base and third on the New York Vendée early last summer.
He raced for many miles head to head with Nicolas Lunven, only miles apart and often in sight, in the Southern Ocean before Beyou pulled ahead with a good South Atlantic. In the SE’ly trades he then matched up head to head with Brit Sam Goodchild (VULNERABLE) for over a week until Goodchild tore his mainsail in half.
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