Vendee Globe: Pip Hare on setting up a high performance team

IMOCA Medallia, skippers Pip Hare is portraited before the Transat Jacques Vabre, in Poole, Great Britain © Mark Lloyd

Running your own race team is the dream of many current and would be professional sailors, and one that few achieve - let alone a woman in her late forties with just one Vendee Globe race in her logbook.

But Britain's Pip Hare has achieved the near-impossible before the start of this weekend's Vendee Globe race - an event that has never been won by a female sailor - however several have come close, and gone on to become revered names in shorthanded sailing.

All of Hare's competitors are based in France, but she has chosen to stay in UK.

Hare talks about the challenges she faced in breaking into a male dominated sport where there were no pathways for women, DEI policies or gender quotas. But she has successfully set up her own racing team, purchased a new well-performed boat (the course record holder from the 2016/17), and assembled a shore team.

To add to the challenge she was setting up a British team in a sport dominated by French teams and sailors. In France the record of round the world, and other shorter transoceanic, is etched in the national psyche - and there is no need to explain to potential sponsors what the race is about, and the following it generates. Outside France the Vendee is a much harder sell. However the event realises that it has to expand into the English-speaking media and generate a wider fan base.

In the first video Pip Hare looks back over a 32 year professional sailing career - beginning when she left school at 18yrs old.

In the second video she explains how she plans, runs, funds, and skippers the various campaigns undertaken by Pip Hare Ocean Racing. An on board video shows what life is like for a 50yr old woman competing in singlehanded offshore racing.