Cayard Is Learning That Hope Does Float

If this were a normal sailboat regatta, Paul Cayard and his 11 mates could sit out the last leg of the Whitbread ‘Round-the-World Race and relax while Swedish Match, Merit Cup and Chessie battled for second and third place. Cayard’s EF Language has circled the planet so far ahead of eight rivals, it has an insurmountable lead with one leg to go.

But Whitbread rules require all boats to finish. Of course, the crew could just deliver the boat safely to the finish line at Southampton, England, trailing the fleet across the English Channel, taking care to avoid injury or damage with victory guaranteed on arrival.

But Cayard says he wants to go out a winner and will seek another victory on the 450-mile dash to England. No other boat has won more than one leg. He wants to win four. “That’s how we are,” said Cayard, 38, by phone Monday from LaRochelle, France, where the fleet is preparing for the final sprint. “Our egos drive us to excel and win.”

Cayard sounded a bit deflated after orchestrating a tiresome cat-and-mouse game to seal the overall win over second-place Swedish Match. By finishing sixth Sunday on the 3,500-mile leg from Annapolis to LaRochelle, EF’s worst finish to date but a notch ahead of the seventh-place Swedes, EF upped its overall lead to 115 points. With 105 points available for the winner of Leg 9, EF can’t be caught.

But it meant sitting on royal blue Swedish Match for two weeks, “staying between the man and the hoop,” as the Californian skipper put it.

“We had a specific mission: end the Whitbread ‘Round-the-World Race,” said Cayard, a four-time America’s Cup skipper and former Star class world champion. “The last leg has a potential to be tricky with a lot of current, big headlands and commercial shipping. I saw a lot of volatility there.

“We set out to finish ahead of Swedish Match on Leg 8, and it wasn’t easy. It’s hard to mirror someone you can’t see. All we had was a snapshot of where they were every six hours” via e-mailed position updates from the race committee. “There was anxiety, but we hung in and got the job done. It was boring and anticlimactic in the end, but we’re professionals, and that’s what we do.”

Cayard and crew now are within sight of the Volvo Trophy, the prize for winning the world’s toughest sailboat race. The 18-month ordeal--10 months of training and eight of racing over some of the coldest, cruelest seas on Earth--is nearly done.

EF Language was considered a long shot when the fleet left Southampton in September, bound 31,600 miles around the globe. Cayard never had sailed in a Whitbread, and only three of his crew had experience in the race. Navigator Nick White quit 10 days before the start, forcing Cayard to make a last-hour appointment of fellow Californian Mark Rudiger, another Whitbread novice, to the crucial post.

But EF was first across the starting line, first to finish the inaugural leg to Cape Town, South Africa, and since has fallen out of first place overall only once. “I never expected to win three of the first five legs,” Cayard said. “I thought we’d struggle at first, then come on strong.”

EF survived a brutal introduction to the Southern Ocean on the leg from Cape Town to Fremantle, Australia, when Cayard--by his own admission--drove EF and its crew too hard in the latitudes called the Roaring 40s. He shredded a half-dozen sails, broke winches, steering wheels and rigging, and bloodied bowman Curtis Blewett, who was caught up the mast and flung around like a rag doll during a wild broach.

The key to success, said Cayard, was “having the guts to look ourselves in the mirror when we got to Fremantle and say, ‘Why did things go wrong?’ The Whitbread is all about the Southern Ocean,” he said. “You’ve got to get through it.”

In its second time in the frigid, trackless seas around Antarctica on the long, fifth leg from Auckland, New Zealand, around treacherous Cape Horn to Sao Sebastiao, Brazil, the EF crew showed it had learned. It won the leg by a staggering three days, sustaining no damage or injuries while two rivals lost masts.

Now EF Language is the winner. But which boat will come next? Swedish Match has a strong hold on second place with 629 points, with five-time Whitbread veteran Grant Dalton third in Merit Cup at 593. The dark horse is Chessie, the Maryland entry and the only team in the race without a commercial sponsor, at 583.