The four courses for the Transat Café L‘Or 2025 were presented to the press on Thursday morning at the Paris headquarters of JDE, the race’s founding partner. It was an opportunity for Tip & Shaft to talk to its race director, Francis Le Goff.
In the first sequence of the film Le Monstre, shown at the Sailorz Film Festival 2024, we see you say that you want to stop your job of race director, so complicated were the postponements of the start to manage with the classes, what finally made you decide to stay on?
It’s true that in this last edition, we took some knocks, some of them normal because it’s the weather that decides and our job is to adapt, others coming from people who didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand. And it’s true that it made me wonder whether I really needed to do that to myself. Now, once that episode was over, there were two main reasons that convinced me to take part again: firstly, the commitment of the people in Martinique, who really pulled together to make sure the race went well, two years after the first edition, where we all had a rough time of it because of the riots; secondly, the fact that this transatlantic race starts in Le Havre, a city that I’m very attached to and that I still want to see shine. But it wasn’t straight away, I took the time to think about all that before telling myself that I was going back.
You’ve had to deal with these stories again, as you should have unveiled the routes at the press conference announcing the change of the name in December (see our article), but this was not possible due to disagreements between the classes. Can you tell us what happened?
As far as we were concerned, there were no complexities. To explain how things work, with Yann Chateau (assistant race director), we first take into account the wishes of the organisers. In this case, they tell us that they want the Transat Café L’Or to remain the longest, that it shouldn’t resemble the Route du Rhum, and that three classes, Ultim, Imoca and Ocean Fifty, should arrive at roughly the same time. On that basis, we’re proposing courses – which are not the ones we unveiled today and which were close to those initially planned for 2023 – with more miles than the other races, with a more southerly route, around 14 days for the frontrunners. And we’re pushing this on to the classes. They then all have a good reason to say that it doesn’t suit them, knowing that in the background, the problem is always the same, namely that each class wants to get to Martinique first. Now, in a multi-class race, the organiser necessarily has to listen, so we had to find solutions to satisfy everyone and Gildas (Gautier, co-director of the race) asked us to tighten up the course so that, on paper, we would have the three winners in the same day. Which we did, with a shorter transatlantic race on which we ran ten years of routing; in four cases, the Imoca boats came first, compared with three for the Ultims and as many for the Ocean Fifties!
“Around twenty boats
on the Transat Paprec”
In the end, the courses and above all the duration (11-12 days) are different from the Route du Rhum, but they‘re close, so aren’t we losing a little of the DNA of the Transat Café L’Or?
To tell you otherwise would be a lie. Now, it’s already due to going to Martinique. If we went to Brazil, the question wouldn’t arise and the Doldrums would be there for everyone. But we’ve still managed to maintain some waypoints to do a bit of southing. Finally, the best argument that the Class40s and Imoca boats have been able to put forward is the fact that these courses allow for more strategic play, with different routes, as we saw in 2023, with Justine Mettraux and several other Class40s opting for a more northerly route. We were quite sensitive to this aspect.
Before the Transat Café L’Or, you’ll be the race director of the Transat Paprec in April. How does this edition look? And do you have any other races in your portfolio?
The switch to the mixed format was an ambitious one on the part of OC Sport and above all Paprec, who really insisted on it. We heard a lot of people telling us that we were going to fail, that we shouldn’t impose things. In the end, we now have 24 declared projects; we may lose 20%, but we should have around twenty boats, twice as many as in 2023, which is a great success for this transatlantic race to which I’m very attached. After that, on the strength of my experience in last year’s Olympic Games, I’ll be working in July on the start of the Tall Ship Races in Le Havre, we’ll be trying to put on a great parade.
“The Olympics? A form of pride”
Talking of the Olympic Games, where you directed the river parade at the opening ceremony, what did this experience bring you?
I’ve learnt an enormous amount, particularly about all the contingency plans we’ve put in place. For me, at the beginning, it was a dirty word, I didn’t really know what it meant; in fact, all the time, you have to imagine scenarios and find solutions. It’s all written down on paper, but when it happens to you, like the rain at the ceremony, you have a lot of answers, and above all, the whole environment is aware of what’s going to happen and works in unison. I remember finding myself alone in front of more than 100 people in the huge auditorium of the Economic and Social Council, under the questions from the IOC who asked me: “Mr Le Goff, what have you planned if such and such a thing happens?” But we had worked on all this beforehand, so I had the answers. It’s a really good lesson that I’ve learnt from it, and we need to institutionalise it more on the big races, which is what I’m trying to do for the Transat Café L’Or. After that, on a more personal level, Im satisfied with the job done. When you’ve moored the last boat, when you know that everyone has gone out and that you haven’t messed up a single artistic scene, and when you’re in front of your desk, raised up like a schoolmaster, with the whole room around you – the GIGN, the BRI, the RAID, the river brigade, the State services, the Mairie de Paris and so on – standing up and applauding you, you inevitably feel a certain pride.
Is this the hardest mission you’ve ever done?
No, it’s very complex and I must admit that sometimes I thought I was going to turn back. When you come out of the BRI and the guys have given you the scenario of the guy who, from a roof, shoots 15 people on a boat that ends up across the river, and they ask you how it’s managed, you ask yourself questions. But in the beginning, it’s all about motorboats with guys who take passengers up and down the Seine all year round and know their job. For me, sailing races are more difficult. The Route du Rhum, for example, is really tough: when you start with 120 boats on the line, the stress isn’t the same.
Photo: Alea / Transat Jacques Vabre
