On the starting line of the Route du Rhum 2026, the contenders for victory were numerous and the outcome uncertain. After six days, 13 hours and 27 minutes of a race led from start to finish by one man, Tom Laperche won in Pointe-à-Pitre on Sunday, November 8. The youngest in the Ultim class did better than his very experienced elders like Thomas Coville, expected for second place, or even Charles Caudrelier and Armel Le Cléac'h, forced to retire. At 29, he even became the youngest multihull winner in the history of the solo transatlantic race.
Le Rhum was the logical continuation of his irresistible rise, a year after his success in the Transat Café L'Or alongside Franck Cammas. But with this victory, Tom Laperche has reached a milestone. He is no longer the young protégé of François Gabart, who took him on as an internship during the design of the SVR-Lazartigue during his engineering studies, before taking him on the Transat Café L'Or 2021 and 2023 (twice 2nd). The Loudéacian had already proven himself on La Solitaire du Figaro, winning in 2022 at just 25 years old. Then he was entrusted, alone, with the reins of SVR-Lazartigue when François Gabart put his career as a skipper on pause.
He learned from the greatest including Coville, Gabart and Cammas
On this Transatlantic, he did not even need a first attempt to gauge the difficulty of a race that had made him dream since his childhood in Brittany. “The Route du Rhum, I have that deep in my heart. I have dreamed of it since I was little. It was the big trimarans which set off at full speed on the Rhum which made me want to race offshore,” he confided to Le Figaro before setting off from Saint-Malo. Tom Laperche has been immersed in the world of sailing since a young age.
Son of Philippe Laperche, who participated four times in the Solitaire du Figaro, and grandson of another sailor, Loïc Sparfel, he started sailing at 5 years old. "The first two years of his life, we lived in the middle of Brittany. His toys were small tractors with trailers. He put earth and straw in them. When we arrived in Saint-Philibert (opposite Trinité-sur-Mer), he saw the boats launched in the water from the multipole. His tractors then transported boats", recalled his father in the columns of Ouest-France in 2020.
Tom Laperche's idol was Laurent Bourgnon, double winner of the Route du Rhum in 1994 and 1998, and Thomas Coville played the role of mentor alongside him. The man who is expected to be his successor in Guadeloupe had notably entrusted him with the helm of ORMA Sodebo for a few minutes when Tom Laperche was still in primary school. But it was a meeting with François Gabart that marked a turning point in his career as a skipper.
“A cut above”
"I discovered him during a sports catamaran regatta. I was looking for a teammate, says Laperche in Libération. We quickly felt that we had things in common, a good mutual feeling... and a little later, he offered me to do my end-of-studies internship in his shipyard, during the start of construction of SVR-Lazartigue, which at the time had the code name M 101. I obviously dreamed of sailing on this boat, but It was François' project. I was just a trainee, and my goal was to win the Solitaire du Figaro.
After learning alongside François Gabart, it was with Franck Cammas that he perfected his skills last year. "What is impressive about Tom is that he is good everywhere. I don't have the impression that he has a weak point. He immediately sees the right move. He knows how to move his boat forward. He is quite good at managing risk", remarked his twenty-five year old senior for Le Figaro. "He picks up quickly, doesn't catch fire, is extremely calm. He's not old but has sailed on a lot of supports, and therefore already has quite a bit of baggage", continues, in the columns of Libération, the meteorologist Jean-Yves Bernot, who has trained many great sailors and who "routed" Tom Laperche during the race.
There aren't that many people of his age with such experience. He is at the top of the pile, a notch above, like Gabart or Cammas.
Jean-Yves Bernot, meteorologist
at Liberation
This was therefore confirmed in this edition of the Route du Rhum, which saw Tom Laperche avoid all the pitfalls unlike Charles Caudrelier, Armel Le Cléac'h and Anthony Marchand who were among the favorites, and lead the race from start to finish. Representative of this generation of sailors combining engineering training and learning ocean racing, the student has definitely caught up with his masters.
