Tom Laperche won the Route du Rhum – Destination Guadeloupe on his solo debut, crossing the finish line off Pointe-à-Pitre in a new race record of 6 days, 13 hours, 27 minutes and 40 seconds. He shattered Charles Caudrelier’s 2022 mark by 6 hours, 19 minutes and 45 seconds to become the youngest solo winner since Laurent Bourgnon in 1994.
A single decisive gybe off Cap Fréhel
Laperche seized the lead 16 nautical miles after the start in Saint-Malo and never let it go. Forty minutes into the race he was tucked just behind Armel Le Cléac’h on Banque Populaire XI. At the Cap Fréhel gybe mark he kept his large gennaker, executed one clean gybe on the inside line and stepped past his rival.
That nerve held through a brutally unstable first night south of Ireland. “We went from zero knots to 30 knots — with full sail up!” By the small hours he had built a 28-mile lead, and organisers clocked a top speed of 48.9 knots as he passed Ouessant.
Rivals break, a storm holds
The fleet unravelled behind him. Defending champion Caudrelier retired on the Tuesday with foil damage to his new Maxi Edmond de Rothschild. On Wednesday morning Le Cléac’h capsized roughly 550 miles north-west of the Azores and was rescued by a Panamanian cargo ship. Thomas Coville pressed on but lost both foils one after the other and carried a pre-start penalty and sail damage.
Laperche nursed SVR-Lazartigue through squally, shifty weather that forced the leaders north-west in search of pressure, then negotiated a significant tropical storm in the final stages. Coville finished second, 15 hours, 12 minutes and 25 seconds adrift. Louis Burton, in his first Ultim transatlantic, took third on Armand Thiery.
Sustained northerly winds on the leg south to the Azores pushed the Ultims above 30 knots for long periods. The course measured 3,542 nautical miles, but Laperche sailed 4,308 nautical miles at an average actual speed of 27.18 knots.
On a November night in Guadeloupe, he became the twelfth solo winner in the race’s 48-year history.
