Ousted after maternity leave, Clarisse Crémer takes over the helm with another sponsor – Liberation

2023-04-19 18:29:11

Vendée Globe, the Everest of sailingdossier

Twelfth in the last Vendée Globe, the sailor had not been kept for the next edition by Banque Populaire, a decision largely linked to her maternity. The skipper has just found a partner and a boat.

A boat, a team, a sponsor, and here is Clarisse Crémer on the track again to get back on track with a view to the Vendée Globe 2024. The 33-year-old sailor, landed by Banque Populaire, has joined the team of Briton Alex Thomson, recent buyer of the ex-Apivia that his former sponsor intended for him, and will take over the helm of this high-performance Imoca (60-foot monohull) for two years, thanks to the partnership of L’Occitane en Provence.

At the beginning of February, the young woman, twelfth in the last Vendée Globe and mother of a little girl in November, plunged the sailing world into embarrassment by announcing that she had been let go by her sponsor because of her pregnancy. Indeed, new qualification rules for the Vendée Globe take into account the participation in a series of races upstream, and Banque Populaire was worried about the accumulated delay compared to its competitors.

Faced with the prospect of only being on the pontoon in Les Sables d’Olonne in November 2024 to greet the departure of his companion Tanguy Le Turquais, whose own Vendée Globe project has not been disrupted by the birth of their daughter , Clarisse Crémer took up the pen. “There was clearly a desire to spark debate,” explains the HEC graduate who got into sailing thanks to the support of a small community gathered on social networks.

lively controversy

Objective achieved: despite the embarrassed silence of a large part of the still very masculine world of skippers, the controversy was so lively that Banque Populaire, a recognized partner in the world of sailing, quickly threw in the towel. Clarisse Crémer, for her part, remained silent. Firstly “so as not to focus the debate on (his) person” and on the other hand because she very quickly embarked on a new project full time. First, Alex Thomson called her. This 49-year-old British sailor, who embarked on team management after five participations in the Vendée Globe, bought the Imoca in March that the French banking group had acquired last year for Clarisse Crémer.

Then contact was made with L’Occitane, who had accompanied Armel Tripon, eleventh in the last Vendée Globe. “These were the three cornerstones of the project: a team, a boat, a sponsor”, indicates the navigator, who now intends to embark on a “race against time” to chain the miles necessary for its selection. On this point, the race management, which seemed intransigent in February, softened its speech, suggesting that everything would be done to allow Clarisse Crémer to take the start and above all promising to revise its rules for the 2028 edition.

Aware of having become a symbol, the sailor is determined to take advantage of her media coverage to advance the debate on motherhood over the next few years. “Parenthood does not have the same consequence on a career, in particular sports, for a man and for a woman”, recalls the skipper.