Battling cancer, Charlie Dalin sailed 24,000 miles (38,620km) to win the Vendee Globe. Photo / Charlie Dalin
Charlie Dalin stood on the bow of his boat, a light wind at his back, the Atlantic Ocean spread out in front of him.
He had just begun sailing’s most difficult race, a gruelling 24,000-mile (38,620km) solo journey around the world called the Vendee Globe.
The competition, which takes place every four years, starts with about 40 professional sailors. Nearly half of them never finish. Many capsize. One was never found.
As the fleet glided away from the coast of France late last year, cameras zoomed in on Dalin. He was the favourite after finishing second in 2021, a narrow loss that still haunted him.
He redesigned his boat to be faster and more aerodynamic, and the 41-year-old looked almost like an extension of the 18m vessel: tall and angular, as if any excess had been blown off by the wind.
Dalin had kept a secret from his competitors, his fans and even his own team as he embarked on a voyage that would take several months. He was battling gastrointestinal cancer.
He had been diagnosed a year before when a scan revealed a 15cm-long tumour on his small intestine. At first, he wondered if he would survive. Then he wondered if he could race.
To almost anyone else, the idea would seem unhinged.
The Vendee Globe had knocked out sailors in peak physical condition. What might it do to someone who was fighting for his life even before the race began?
Dalin stashed a supply of immunotherapy pills in his cabin. His hope was that the medication would shrink the tumour while he was at sea and he would have the rest of it removed after the race.
He told his wife and his oncologist and almost no one else. He didn’t want them to think he was reckless or selfish or frail.
“I decided to handle it the way I would when I have a problem on board,” he said in one of several interviews with the Washington Post. “I don’t talk about it when the problem arises. I talk about it when it’s repaired.”
Skimming the ocean’s surface, what Dalin felt was the opposite of pain. He felt his health return to him. He started passing his competitors one by one.
He told himself that winning didn’t matter this time. He told himself that a body strong enough for the Vendee Globe would be strong enough to vanquish cancer.
Neither of those things would end up being true.
Dalin had grown up sailing in northwest France. He hung posters of famous French skippers on his bedroom wall.
He stared at the boats preparing to set sail across the Atlantic and imagined he was on board.
In a sport populated by rich kids, Dalin was the son of a single mother who worked as a bus driver and a sales assistant.
A local sailing club loaned him a boat. By 15, he was reading articles about a brutal race called the Vendee Globe.
The race, known as the Everest of the seas, first took place in 1989.
It begins and ends in Les Sables-d’Olonne, France, with competitors sailing through the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa, Cape Leeuwin off Australia, and Cape Horn off Chile – the far edges of the planet. Winning it became an obsession for Dalin.
But in 2023, before his 40th birthday, Dalin felt an intense abdominal pain. He lost 4.5kg.
Still, he had no plan to stop competing until he saw Laure Jacolot, a doctor who vets sailors before major races, including the Vendee Globe.
“I’ve known Charlie for 15 years, and I could tell that something was wrong,” she said. “I ordered him to get a scan immediately.”
It was a gastrointestinal stromal tumour, longer than the blade of his boat knife. It had probably been growing for years.
Larger masses like Dalin’s were considered the most aggressive.
He asked his doctors if he would live to see his then-5-year-old son grow up, and they couldn’t answer.
He started the immunotherapy treatment that attacked the tumour’s cancer cells.
He told his son that he had a ball in his stomach and that he was taking medicine to make the ball smaller. At the time, it seemed to at least halt its growth.
He met Axel Le Cesne, a well-known French oncologist who had advised other serious athletes.
Le Cesne surprised Dalin by saying that it might be possible to race the Vendee Globe the following year, “as long as you take the prescribed medication scrupulously”, Dalin recalled.
Dalin started training again – calisthenics and cardio workouts – and undertook rapid, microscopic repairs of his boat. Getting ready to race 38,620km at sea was like preparing for a triathlon and a career in general contracting at the same time.
Dalin’s eight sails, which he would need to haul below deck, weighed hundreds of pounds each.
He entered the Transat CIC, a solo transatlantic ocean race from Lorient, France, to New York City that is considered a warm-up for the Vendee. He battled extreme fatigue and finished in fourth place.
“I can’t help but wonder: is this treatment compatible with ocean racing?” he recalled thinking in his book, The Force of Destiny, which was published in France in October.
He performed better in his next race, back across the Atlantic, from New York to Les Sables.
It was enough to convince his doctor and his wife, Perrine, who came from a family of sailors, that he should take a chance on the Vendee Globe. But no one knew what the world’s hardest race might do to his body.
“Medicine is not an exact science. We can never know if participating in this race has allowed us to prolong Charlie’s life or shorten it,” Jacolot later said in an interview with the Post.
As he prepared for the race, the ache in his stomach seemed to disappear. Dalin chose to believe that its retreat was a sign that he was ready to compete, that he was making the right decision.
In his first weeks at sea, sailing towards the equator, Dalin found his rhythm. When a sail tore, he quickly patched it.
When a daily alarm went off, he reached for his cancer medication. He dodged whales. He took selfies in front of placid seas and setting suns.
Then, looking at his radar, Dalin saw a massive low-pressure system appear southwest of Australia, like a brushstroke across the screen.
He had two choices.
If he went north, he would avoid the storm, but the winds would be slower and he might be overtaken by competitors.
If he went south, he could surf the edge of the storm with its faster gusts. He also could be sucked into the storm itself, with towering waves that could easily swallow his boat.
Competitors had capsized there in previous races, clinging to overturned boats in frigid waters for days before they were rescued.
In 1997, one sailor, Gerry Roufs, called race organisers, frantic. “The waves are not waves, they are higher than the Alps,” he exclaimed. Roufs’ boat and his body disappeared.
Dalin knew those stories. He spent hours on his laptop agonising over projections of the storm. He decided he would take the more conservative approach, going north, avoiding the massive swell.
And then, remembering the despair he felt after losing the last Vendee, he changed his mind.
Race commentators watched his boat’s satellite location veer towards the cyclone. They warned that he was being pushed toward the icebergs and ice floes of the South Pole.
“It must be nerve-wracking to live with this sword of Damocles hanging over your head,” one wrote.
For days, his boat was pounded with 9m waves and 65km/h gusts. It felt like he was inside of a washing machine.
When Dalin felt a pang in his stomach, he wondered if his tumour had grown, or if it was the buffeting seas. The immunotherapy medication made it feel like he was constantly on sleeping pills.
Whenever he could, he lay down on his makeshift mattress, which looked like a medical stretcher, and closed his eyes.
But by mid-December, a month into the race, Dalin was leading by more than 320km. His high-risk decision to surf the storm had paid off.
He continued chronicling his voyage, uploading videos and photos, and offering interviews to journalists over a satellite internet connection.
He sometimes looked like an astronaut in a space station, a blurry figure tumbling across the earth.
His doctors couldn’t examine Dalin during the race. If anyone else boarded his boat, he would be disqualified, according to Vendee Globe rules.
So instead, they dissected the clips, looking for hints, even when it was hard to discern what was a product of the race and what was a sign of the cancer.
On December 11, as he moved out of the Indian Ocean and into the Pacific, he told an interviewer about his strategy after the punishing storm: “I’m living by the day”.
On December 12, he took a selfie after shaving his beard, the fatigue legible on his face.
On December 13, in the middle of a rocky night, the camera bumping along with the waves, he reported nervously: “Very, very unstable tonight”.
On December 15, he smiled, telling reporters that he got a piece of filet mignon in his daily freeze-dried meal.
But by December 16, Yoann Richomme, a longtime rival who had frequently outperformed Dalin, was catching up, only 30km behind. The next day, Richomme took the lead.
The two men sailed within sight of each other just north of Antarctica, banging so hard against the rough seas that both worried their boats would break. Dalin recorded a video of his competitor inching closer.
“Look, who’s there,” Dalin exclaimed. “Richomme himself!”
Dalin was exhausted.
“Is it my tumour that is inevitably tiring me out? Is it because I’ve pushed my sailboat harder than ever before? Probably a bit of both,” he wrote in his book.
Jacolot, the race doctor, sent him short text messages: “How are you?” and “Is everything okay?” She received curt responses. “Fine”, and “All good”.
Dalin lost track of the days until he looked at his pill box, with letters marking each day of the week. He adjusted the time he took the pills as he sailed through time zones. Before New Year’s Eve, off the coast of Brazil, he passed Richomme, retaking the lead.
He called his wife to count down the new year together. She had often told him before races: “Charlie, if you’re going to leave home for so long, it’s to win!”
And here he was, leading the Vendee Globe. She was with friends at a house on Ile-aux-Moines, in Brittany. He could hear their voices, muffled in the background, as he sailed silently through the South Atlantic.
When he was back on land, he knew, he would have the surgery to remove the tumour.
He had fixed problem after problem on the boat – several torn sails, two broken port winches, a 1.5m crack inside the hull. He would fix himself next.
Over the final weeks of the race, Dalin extended his lead. He passed the Azores and then rounded the northern edge of Portugal. He started picturing what his boat might look like, gliding into the French harbour.
He recorded one last video dispatch as the sun set on January 13, staring at the horizon.
“It smells like home,” he said.
He had shaved with an electric razor, “to avoid dismounting with the look of a sea vagabond”.
There were boats and dinghies spread out across the harbour. He looked closer, squinting into the orange light, and recognised some of the people on board: his friends, his team, his fans. The cameras zoomed in on his face – tan, gaunt, sleep-deprived.
“He has delivered an absolutely immaculate win,” the announcer said, as Dalin bent down to kiss the bow of his boat.
In front of Dalin a clock was ticking with his time: 64 days, 19 hours, 22 minutes. He lit two red flares in celebration. He was going to set the race record.
He decided he would tell the world about his cancer diagnosis at the post-race news conference.
He docked his boat in the harbour and leaped on to dry land.
When he walked toward the news conference, he was still wearing his yellow waterproof overalls and sunglasses on his head. The crowd parted for him, applauding as he passed.
Before he walked onstage, he changed his mind about sharing the diagnosis.
If he told the world he had cancer, it would change the questions posed to him: would he survive? Was his decision to race reckless?
The focus would veer away from one of the world’s great athletic achievements.
“I thought: I’ll get a surgery, I’ll get everything out, I’ll get my normal life back and then I’ll talk about it,” he said later.
So when a reporter asked how he was feeling, he said his only injury was “a sailmaker’s needle that I stuck deep into my thumb”.
“Of course, I had some problems. But I managed to repair or replace everything,” he said, referring not to the fact that the immunotherapy medication seemed to be working, or that he felt the sharp pain of his tumour only a few times while at sea, or that he was still alive.
The next days were a blur: more interviews, more television appearances, a congratulatory call from French President Emmanuel Macron.
He still had not disclosed his diagnosis, but on the call with Macron, he almost let it slip.
“I was on the verge of saying to him, ‘But you don’t know everything, Mr President,’” he recalled.
Days later, he had his first CT scan after the race. The tumour, he learned, had grown while he sailed. The operation to remove it was scheduled.
Before the surgery, as he sat in the waiting room, Dalin noticed a panoramic photo of the Mediterranean Sea. He tried to imagine the waves rolling across the water and which direction the wind was blowing. Then the nurse came to get him.
The recovery was worse than expected. He stayed in the hospital two weeks longer than scheduled, an epidural inserted in his lower back.
“I can hardly sit on the edge of the bed. I’m in worse shape than I’ve ever been,” he wrote in his book.
Less than three months earlier, he had been holding the Vendee trophy over his head. Now, his bowels were not working and he was being fed through an IV. He was losing weight. He shed all of his muscle mass.
He had begun working on a book about the race in which he would disclose his cancer diagnosis. He searched for the words to describe how he felt.
“Like a vegetable,” he wrote.
When the book came out in October, it shocked the sailing world. It seemed impossible to fans that the same person who broke the Vendee record had been battling cancer the whole time.
“What he achieved is superhuman,” said Armel Le Cleac’h, a previous winner of the race.
After making the cancer announcement, Dalin said that he would not compete in the next Vendee Globe.
He has not spoken in detail about his prognosis. He does not yet know if he’ll need another surgery.
“The aim is to get back to life as normal as possible,” he said.
He replayed the race finish in his head, remembering the moment his wife and son embraced him on the stern of his boat.
Dalin knows that some people will criticise his decision to participate in the race. But there’s no proof, he says, that it set back his recovery.
He thinks about the weeks at sea, when the disease seemed to retreat from his mind and body. Or even before that, on the eve of the race, how he felt healthy and prepared.
“It would have been pretty tough to watch the race from my couch.”
And once he decided to compete, attempting to win felt less like a choice than a physical reaction to being at sea. It was the only way he knew how to sail.
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