There was a moment when Clarisse Crémer stopped working her boat and simply wept. She crouched below deck, sheltering from the wind and waves that were battering the hull into pieces. The solo yachtswoman was mid-race, between France and New York, in May. If she did not finish the Transat CIC, she would fail to qualify for the 2024 Vendée Globe, the round-the-world race that takes place every four years. But there was a crack in her bulkhead more than four metres long. This was not about racing any more, it was about surviving.
“It’s always super humbling,” Crémer says, recalling her emotions that day. “Sailors are competitive people, we like to push ourselves and the boat hard, but suddenly you realise you’re just on a very small boat in the middle of a big ocean and the amount of water around you is infinite.”
For the next four days she gingerly shepherded her craft across 500 miles to the Azores and her only hope of repair. Her technical team worked in shifts for three days: Crémer ended up sailing L’Occitane en Provence across the finish line in New York with just hours to spare.
On Sunday the French sailor will compete in the Vendée Globe for a second time. In the last edition she became the fastest woman to sail solo around the world, breaking the record set by Ellen MacArthur in 2005. Her presence on the starting line is a miracle and a rebuke to the chauvinism she continues to face in ocean racing. Last year Crémer was sacked by her team a few months after becoming a mother. This year an anonymous smear campaign was launched against her, accusing her of cheating in the Vendée by receiving help from her husband and fellow racer, Tanguy Le Turquais.
It has been “the most intense” period of the 34-year-old’s life, “with many, many things that I would not have seen coming”. The tears she shed halfway across the Atlantic were born of frustration. “I’m a fighter and usually I keep going,” she says, “but it’s very hard to not have these few moments of being just a bit discouraged. What’s going on? Why can’t it be easy at some point?”
At home in Lorient, on the Brittany coast, Crémer is packing in precious time with Tanguy and their daughter, Mathilde, who is about to turn two, before taking to the water for the next three months. Solo ocean racing is a brutally taxing sport (almost half of the 200 skippers to enter the Vendée Globe have failed to complete the race). But Crémer has faced more adversity off the water than she ever has on it.
In the 2020-21 edition of the Vendée Globe, a record six of the 33 entrants were women; four of those completed the race. Returning home after 87 days at sea, she told Banque Populaire she wanted to start a family, and her sponsor agreed to support her. While her husband could still use the full period to qualify for his first Vendée – he was at sea when Mathilde was born – Crémer’s pregnancy gave her a far more limited window.
In February 2023 Banque Populaire announced they would be replacing her, saying she “could not hope to obtain the number of points necessary”. Crémer’s impassioned public response – asking whether equality for women simply meant “not getting pregnant” – raised eyebrows in a sport where grateful sailors are expected to kowtow to wealthy team owners. Some told Crémer she had made herself too difficult to sponsor. “I said, ‘Oh wow, is that really the world we’re in? You want us to just shut the fuck up?’”
A few days later she received a call from the British yachtsman Alex Thomson, who had retired after his fifth Vendée Globe to set up his own team. He admired what he’d seen of Crémer – “she’s very authentic and honest, which not everybody is” – and was angry at her sacking. He asked if she still wanted to race. “She was pretty guarded, pretty low,” Thomson says. “She said, ‘Well of course I would Alex, but I have no team, no boat, no sponsor. I have nothing.’”
Within seven weeks Thomson had secured sponsorship from L’Occitane and assembled a team. When the public backlash against Banque Populaire caused them to withdraw from the race altogether, he bought her boat back – “probably the biggest financial gamble I’ve ever taken in my life”.
The biggest task was rebuilding Crémer’s confidence. She asked the former ocean racer turned development coach Sidney Gavignet for help with her mental preparation. “That’s one of the things I’ve worked on the most since the last Vendée,” she says. “I’m the same person, but I’m very different in the way I face challenges and issues.”
Which was lucky, because a second torpedo was about to be fired. Crémer was training in Gosport in February when her management team told her she had been accused of receiving routing advice during the last Vendée Globe; any kind of guidance, even from your own team, is against the rules. Screenshots from their WhatsApp chats had been sent to the president of the French sailing federation and leaked to various media outlets.
“When I first heard about it, I was like, ‘This is a joke, because I know I haven’t cheated,’” she says. “And then you see the screenshots and you’re like, ‘This is a nightmare. Are they really distorting reality like that?’ It was the first time I was getting out of this pregnancy story … so being hit like that again was super painful because I had put so much energy to just exist again.”
Thomson says: “We felt like we were on the upward trajectory and this just destroyed her.” Living in Lorient, the town that is the base for almost the entire ocean racing community, “she was being judged by everybody, everybody had an opinion”.
An investigation was launched, with the threat of a substantial ban if Crémer was found guilty. At the hearing she and Tanguy set out the true context of the messages. “It was a relief to be able to defend ourselves in front of actual human beings,” says Crémer, who was cleared of any misconduct. “I was in tears, like, ‘Help us, just take us out of this.’”
Crémer says she has “some idea” who was behind the leak and is amazed they have not been held to account. “The motivation for me is very clear. People thought they had the opportunity to stop me doing the Vendée Globe.”
To Thomson, the episode has been a wake-up call. “While I was competing on the circuit I would have said it was an environment where women were treated equally. In reality, I just didn’t have my eyes open. Seeing what’s happened to Clarisse was a real travesty.”
Crémer notes that much of the support she received was from “people who were not French” – including Sam Davies, the British yachtswoman who also had a baby between her first and second Vendée Globes. Davies is a leading member of The Magenta Project, a charity that supports women in sailing careers. It has called for a change to the Vendée Globe rules to ensure what happened to Crémer does not happen again.
Perhaps no woman is more important in Crémer’s life than Lena, her 27-year-old sister-in-law, who is Mathilde’s “third parent” when she and Tanguy are racing. “It’s not always easy to say goodbye,” Crémer says. “Of course you worry and of course you are a bit sad to be missing some steps of her childhood. But there are positive aspects too, like the bond Mathilde has with Lena and with her grandmother.”
Solo racing is all about self-reliance, but Crémer knows that, with her husband as a fellow competitor, she will need even more resilience this time around. “During the last Vendée, Tanguy was a huge emotional support. But now I’m really trying to preserve him my emotions and not to complain too much when he’s at sea.”
Thomson and his team have seen a “transformation” in Crémer since they first came together. “I’ve got an awful lot of respect for her because she jumped back in with both feet,” he says. ‘She’s a pretty unique person. To change the course of this sport is not easy, but Clarice really has her head above the parapet.”
For Crémer, time on the ocean brings its own rewards – the ever-changing light, the wildlife encounters. But it is how sport can bring about change that really motivates her. “What does it mean to sail around the world by yourself? What value is it adding to society? Nothing. But if you choose to support women, whatever the challenges they are going to face, if you choose to show people how to do that – that’s so much more important.”
