LONE STAR

AS WINNER OF THE GOLDEN GLOBE RACE, KIRSTEN NEUSCHÄFER IS THE FIRST WOMAN TO WIN A SOLO AROUND THE WORLD RACE. HELEN FRETTER FINDS OUT WHAT DRIVES HER

- HELEN FRETTER

“Sometimes in the tropics, if it’s nice and calm, I’ll drop sail and I’ll lash the helm over to one side,” recalled Kirsten Neuschäfer before the start of the Golden Globe Race. “I’ll jump overboard and have a swim around the boat, and sometimes I’ll swim away from the boat, just to get that feeling of vastness. That sense of eternity. That if the boat did sail away, it would be eternity. And it is a scary thought, but it’s also kind of intriguing.”

What does it take to compete in the longest race in the world, over eight months of isolation? Where the odds are firmly stacked against you. So skewed, in fact, that the risk is not of failure, but of literally having to abandon everything. Perhaps that is part of the appeal: this is a race that can take you to the edge, tempting you to touch the void, to peer into eternity.

Five years ago, the sailing world witnessed a grand experiment. Eighteen solo skippers set off on a recreation of the Golden Globe Race. Small long-keeled yachts, carrying only the most rudimentary technology, plunged into the southern ocean in a bid to race around the world in a homage to the 1968 pioneering event. But the attrition rate was devastating: four skippers had to abandon their boats - one seriously injured; five yachts were dismasted; 13 retired.

You might think potential entrants who witnessed how the 2018 fleet was ravaged by knockdowns, barnacles, even toxic mould, would be put off. But there is something about the Golden Globe Race, a ‘back to basics’ around the world race, that earns it a unique place in sailors’ psyches. It is sailing’s Everest climb. And so in 2022 another 16 (15 men, one woman) set off to do it all again. Among them was Kirsten Neuschäfer.