Charlie Dalin and Jérémie Beyou. “It’s
quite terrifying,” said Hare from Brest,
where she was the first competitor to
arrive before the race start. “It’s
nerve-racking — it’s a big fleet with
some big names this year. The boat
has had a great refit, it is in great
condition and I am turning up on
very different terms. This is a kind of
line in the sand for me; this is where I
need to progress forwards from.”
After being an almost unknown
outsider in the last Vendée Globe,
Hare is aiming for the next one inHare, right, is
enjoying some
significant
breakthroughs
on Medallia 2 as
she embarks on a
series of races
before 2024Sport
Hare turns up
the power on
Vendée rivals
E
xecuting in high-level sport
is often as much about feel
and instinct as adherence to
set routines or trying to
stick to numbers.
Just ask Pip Hare who has been
spending the past few weeks getting
to know her new foiling Imoca yacht
— a high-octane racing machine
that is capable of hitting
speeds of 30 knots, as it
lifts and turns the power
of the wind into almost
effortless forward
motion.
Medallia 2 was built
in 2015; it won the
2016-17 Vendée Globe
solo round-the-world
race and it was third in the
last edition of the race in
2020-21. Now Hare has got hold
of it and, as she prepares for her first
race in it this weekend, she admits
that to start with, she used the foils
more to plough furrows in the ocean
than to go faster. It was all about feel
and she was struggling to understand
and to click with the boat — when it
was happy, when it was struggling to
reach its full potential and how it
liked to be set up, depending on wind
or sea conditions.
But four weeks of intensive
pre-season training off thewill take on a 1,200-mile ocean
triangle. It is likely to start with a long
leg over to the Fastnet Rock off the
southwest coast of Ireland, followed
by another out to a virtual turning
mark in the Atlantic, before returning
to Brest.
After racking up about 8,000 miles
in training since the boat was
relaunched in Poole in March, Hare is
feeling ready. But it’s a daunting
prospect to race for the first time with
foils against the best in the world, solo
superstars such as the French duo,Portuguese coast has been a
breakthrough experience for Hare,
48, who impressed the sailing world
when finishing 19th out of 33 starters
in the previous Vendée Globe —
despite sailing the second-oldest boat
in the fleet and having to replace a
rudder in the Southern Ocean.
In Portugal, Hare worked with Jack
Bouttell, the Australian bowman on
Dongfeng Race Team, the 2018 Volvo
Ocean Race winners, and from the
start Bouttell was talking sensations,
feelings and instinct. “During our
delivery sail to Portugal, Jack was
saying, ‘You can feel this, so you’ve
got to do this, and this, and this.. .’ ”
she says. “I remember sitting there
going, ‘I don’t think I am ever
going to get this. He was
telling me what he was
feeling and I was
thinking, ‘I can’t feel
this, I can’t feel it.’
“It was frustrating
for me, I don’t do
things by numbers, I
need to know what it
feels like, so that I can
replicate it.”
But the progress has been
dramatic and after a 1,400-
nautical mile solo trip from Cascais
out into the Atlantic over Easter,
Hare came back in towards the coast
with the boat humming. “I came back
into Cascais in 30 knots of wind with
the boat sitting constantly at 26-27
knots [of speed] and I could feel it, I
could feel it,” she said laughing,
enjoying the recollection.
Her first race on Medallia 2 — the
Guyader Bermudes 1000 — starts on
Sunday from Brest, when Hare and 23
other solo skippers in the Imoca classBritish sailor ready for
first race with superfast
foil she hopes takes her
challenge to next level,
she tells Ed Gorman
2024 with the objective of trying to
finish in the top ten, in what will still
be an older boat compared with the
latest foiling designs. It’s an ambitious
target, made possible by enhanced
funding from Medallia, a California-
based management company, but not
one Hare talks about without being
prompted. She is too modest for that.
So this race will be her first chance
to see how realistic that goal is going
to be. “My objective would be to
maintain the boat’s performance at a
steady rate through the race,” she
said, “make sure I hit my polars [the
boat’s theoretical maximum
performance numbers], not find any
excuses and just take everything I’ve
learnt and apply it.”
The English sailor has had a few
days to acclimatise in Brest. But she
found time to pop back across the
Channel this weekend to race with
friends on an old quarter-tonner at
her home town regatta in Poole.
The Guyader Bermudes 1000 is the
beginning of her new adventure, as
she builds up to the Vendée Globe in
the autumn of 2024. After this race
she will take part in the 3,570-mile
solo Vendée Arctique in June; she will
race fully crewed in the Sevenstar
Round Britain and Ireland classic in
August, and the solo Route du Rhum
transatlantic race in November.
Hare needs to get through all these
challenges — and subsequent races
next year — without trashing her
boat. “I don’t think I am a wild risk-
taker anyway,” she said. “My strength
is probably more in that I’m not lazy.
I won’t settle. I will always say, ‘Could
this be better, could I do more, could I
push harder?’ I will never follow the
pack... I’m never happy with that.”95
Days it took Hare to
complete the Vendée
Globe in 2020-21 — 15 days
behind the French
winning skipper
Yannick BestavenOCEAN IMAGES/PIP HARE OCEAN RACINGthe times | Monday May 2 2022 47