Patrice Carpentier appointed Golden Globe Race Director
Don McIntyre, founder of the 2018 Golden Globe race, is proud to announce the appointment of Patrice Carpentier (above) the well-known French sailor, author and editor of Course au Large Magazine, as Race Director.
Patrice, who has been sailing since the age of 12, and is multilingual, brings a wealth of experience to this leadership role, having completed five circumnavigations.
These include the first two Whitbread Round the World Races aboard Grand Louis and Gauloises 2, and two Vendée Globe solo non-stop races. He also finished 2nd overall in the 1991 Mini Transat despite suffering a broken mast during the first leg.
He competed successfully with standard production yachts in two Route du Rhum races in 1982 and 1990 and was still winning in 2017 with victory in the 2-handed IRC/UNCL championship. All told, Patrice (67) has clocked up more than 300,000 sailing miles and crossed the Atlantic 35 times.
With 4 months until the start of the 2018 Golden Globe Race from Les Sables d’Olonne, France on July 1, the number of entrants now stands at 20, representing 13 countries.
These skippers have a remarkable range of backgrounds. Professional sailors and adventurers dominate, but they also include an engineer, foreign exchange trader, hydrographer, pilot, tailor and university lecturer. All have considerable short – and single-handed sailing experience, one having logged five solo circumnavigations. They hail from Australia (2), Estonia (1), Finland (1), France (4), Ireland (1), India (1), Italy (1), Netherlands (1), Norway (1), Palestine (1), Russia (1), UK (3), and the USA (2). Their average age is 47. The youngest, Britain’s Susie Goodall is 28; the oldest, French solo veteran Jean-Luc Van Den Heede is 72.
