Sept 10 (Reuters) - France’s Paul Meilhat and his United by the Ocean crew snatched victory in the inaugural Ocean Race Atlantic on Thursday, overhauling American skipper Francesca Clapcich’s 11th Hour Racing in the final miles off the Brittany coast.
The French IMOCA 60, crewed by two men and two women under the race's mandatory gender-balance rule, seized the lead only in the closing miles after the top three boats had sailed almost neck-and-neck for much of the morning along the final stretch to Lorient.
11th Hour Racing had briefly held the advantage by less than half a nautical mile in the early afternoon.Kojiro Shiraishi's Japanese entry DMG MORI Global One lurked just a few miles further back.
But Meilhat's crew found an extra gear when it mattered most, moving clear as the fleet converged on the finish line after crossing some 3,000 nautical miles from New York, a voyage that took eight days.
Light and shifting winds offLorient had repeatedly shuffled the order like a deck of cards in the final 24 hours, right until the front-runners approached the French coast.
DMG MORI Global One and Boris Herrmann's Team Malizia are due to finish later on Thursday. Embrace the Challenge and MSIG Europe, who opted for a more direct southerly route, remain at sea and are due to complete the course in the coming days.
The Ocean Race Atlantic is a new transatlantic sailing race organised by The Ocean Race, taking fully crewed IMOCA yachts on a roughly 3,000-nautical-mile course from New York to Lorient, France. The inaugural edition features six boats, each sailed by a four-person, gender-balanced crew plus an onboard reporter, and is designed as astandalone event between editions of the round-the-world Ocean Race.
IMOCA 60s are high-performance 60-foot (18.3-metre) ocean-racing yachts, some equipped with hydrofoils that lift the hull partly out of the water to reduce drag and increase speed. They are designed for long-distance offshore racing and are also the boats used in the solo round-the-worldVendee Globe.
(Editing by Toby Davis)
