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Yannick Bestaven on target.
In every sense
Photo: Loic Venance / AP
Anyone who grows up in Arcachon in Gironde has always looked to the sea.
The region with the famous dune landscape on the Atlantic Ocean, the destination of countless caravan tourists, lives with and from the sea, whoever grows up there learns to deal with water at an early age.
You could say: Yannick Bestaven was born a sailor.
To win a regatta like the mythical Vendée Globe, however, it takes a little more than sailor's blood.
"I am stubborn and resilient," said the 48-year-old Frenchman about his character traits before the start of the circumnavigation of the world, and he urgently needed both in order to end up as the great winner in the destination port of Les Sables-d'Olonne.
Stubbornness, resilience - and helpfulness.
The fact that he ran around the world as the winner of the Vendée Globe after 80 days, 3 hours, 44 minutes and 15 seconds also has to do with those dramatic hours almost two months ago on November 30th, when Bestaven's compatriot Kevin Escoffier in a troubled sea and wind force 6 southwest of Cape Town got into distress.
Bestaven was - like Jean Le Cam and Boris Hermann - one of the sailors who took part in the search for Escoffier and who accepted that they would lose hours in the fight for places.
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"It's like a dream, I'm hallucinating"
Photo: STEPHANE MAHE / REUTERS
The race management compensated the participants who went in search of Escoffier for their selflessness with appropriate time credits, Betaven received 10 hours and 15 minutes bonus - and that was enough to win, although his compatriots Charlie Dahlin and Louis Barton in front of him Les Sables-d'Olonne arrived.
The culmination of a dramatic "Hitchcock finals", as "Le Figaro" called it.
The culmination of Boris Hermann's collision with a fish trawler, which deprived the Germans of all chances.
No doubt about the success it deserves
Time credits that ultimately decide a race after 80 days around the world, that may be a bit bitter for Dahlin and Burton, but Bestaven is one of the winners that nobody would spoil for this triumph.
No doubt there was a deserved winner.
The skipper was in the lead for a large part of the regatta, he was the first to reach Cape Horn shortly after the turn of the year.
In those days he drove the tactically cleverest, but also riskiest course in the field, when he drove his boat "Maitre Coq IV" close to the ice limit, trusting the robustness of his material, trusting his stubbornness and resilience.
To its limit.
"It wasn't clear to me before that you can penetrate so deeply into the human body that you can mentally and physically overcome all this stress, this cold, this wetness and this loneliness," Bestaven described his wild journey through the Southern Ocean.
The Frenchman may be an experienced single-handed sailor, having competed in competitions since the mid-1990s, but something like the past few weeks has been uncharted territory for him too.
He has never sailed around Cape Horn, his only appearance at the Vendée Globe lasted just three days.
In 2008, his time with the Vendée was over faster than it had started after a mast broke in the Bay of Biscay.
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Bestaven on board the "Maitre Coq IV"
Photo: SEBASTIEN SALOM-GOMIS / AFP
Bestaven is a tinkerer, like so many of his colleagues at the Vendée, we know each other.
The Frenchman already sailed against Boris Hermann in the Mini-Transit-Regatta in 2001. Bestaven won at that time, and it was already clear then that two great sailing careers would be at the beginning.
At the Vendée both sailed head to head for days.
Sailing is a bit of an exaggeration, however, as both were stuck in the doldrums in December.
Sailing boats, that is Bestaven's life and profession, he has worked and lived as a marine engineer in the legendary coastal town of La Rochelle for years.
La Rochelle is not far from Les Sables-d'Olonne, he saw up close how every four years the Vendée was launched from there, how every four years French sailors achieved this holy grail of circumnavigators.
Now he's done it himself.
"I have the feeling that I am living in a dream, I am hallucinating," said Bestaven when he was greeted with Bengali fires as he entered the harbor in the dark.
After months of loneliness, after wind and weather, the reception, the mood, the light seemed almost unreal to him.
But it really is like this: This day of Yannick Bestaven, it shines.
Icon: The mirror