The Stopover Series unveiled

by Ed Gorman / IMOCA Globe Series 22 Jan 2023 00:58 AEDT 21 January 2023

The Ocean Race, a crewed round the world race, has seven stopovers in all, over six months. A race start in Alicante last Sunday followed by seven stopovers and hence eight episodes filming behind the scenes of each IMOCA team, through the joys and disappointments, the work and the rest. This documentary series is produced by IMOCA in collaboration with Ouest-France and filmed by polaRYSE. It contains exciting new footage with episode one focusing on the last week in Spain.

We are in the midst of the first historic edition of The Ocean Race open to IMOCAs. A crewed round the world race, on flying foilers - where life is often unbearable... - helmed in often unprecedented conditions. Spanning over 32,000 miles, the course takes the crews into all kinds of weather around the globe with an extreme leg of 12,750 miles (23,000 km) in the Deep South, between South Africa and Brazil!

It features an incredible cast of sailors, stars from the ex-Volvo Ocean Race and French offshore racing, gathered together in one fantastic adventure. Crews are mixed with on-board reporters to capture the moment. A marathon at the pace of a sprint for the technical and logistics teams, as well as for the families.

Eight episodes of STOPOVER

The STOPOVER series spans eight episodes of around twenty minutes filmed at the start and at each stopover, which explore the repercussions of the previous leg and anticipate the next. Families, replacements, injury or repairs, the race continues in the hands of the shore team and in the minds of the sailors. We follow the characters we discover and to whom we development an attachment. We get a chance to go into the locker room of teams negotiating one of the craziest playgrounds imaginable.

In this first episode:

• The sailors: Abby Ehler and Sam Goodchild (Team Holcim-PRB), Amélie Grassi and Paul Meilhat (Biotherm) and Benjamin Dutreux (Guyot environnement-Team Europe).
• The On-Board Reporters: veteran Amory Ross (11th Hour Racing Team) and rookies Antoine Auriol (Team Malizia) and Charles Drapeau (Guyot environnement-Team Europe).
• The shore teams with a focus here on Thomas Cardin, technical director of Guyot environnement-Team Europe.

From studying the weather, to deciding which things to take or not to take to sea and a series of sponsor/media events, these pre-race days are hectic, but also serve as a welcome distraction for sailors trying not to overthink what's to come at sea...