Squatting at the bow of her golden trimaran, Florence Arthaud has a smile for the big days. It is November 29, 1990, and the 33-year-old sailor has just won the Route du rhum, the transatlantic grail of all solo sailors. She also had just had a miscarriage at sea, but she did not confide it until much later in her memoirs: A wind of freedom (Arthaud, 2009). In “one” of Parisian, above the portrait of the athlete, this title: “Flo, you’re a real guy! »
“This sums up the whole paradox of offshore racing: both a sport where women play the same game as men, but always according to the rules and values laid down by and for men”summarizes Catherine Louveau, sociologist at the University of Paris-Saclay, specialist in the sexuation of sports practices.
Has there not been progress in this sport, where, however, unlike many others in which women are invisible, Isabelle Autissier, Catherine Chabaud or Ellen McArthur have marked the general public thanks to prestigious performance? The announcement of the navigator Clarisse Crémer“left behind” in mid-February by her sponsor, Banque Populaire, because her pregnancy had delayed her race to qualify for the Vendée Globe 2024, reopened a wound still raw in the small world of offshore racing.
Thus, a skipper whose sporting and communication skills are unanimously recognized – 2e of the Mini-Transat 2017, 12e Vendée Globe 2020 and fastest woman around the world, Sports Strategies Grand Prix in 2021 – couldn’t become a mother without it harming her career? “There were two full seasons and four transatlantic races left to get back to the level, I was fully equipped to finish my rehabilitation as soon as possible. (…). It is easy to deplore, then, the low number of women on the starting lines”, underlines the athlete in his text, which has gone viral, published on social networks.
In response, the management of the Vendée Globe, the most famous single-handed round-the-world race, recalled its impossibility to “changing the rules, while the selection process [est] already committed, behalf “equity towards all the suitors”. But she affirms at the same time as Clarisse Crémer “tick all the boxes” to benefit from the wild card, this invitation attributed at the discretion of the organization. However, faced with the extent of the controversy, Banque Populaire, which had first justified its change of skipper by the desire to “guarantee the future of the project”finally announced his outright abandonment of the race.
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