Rotten bad luck for Alex Thomson

Seajet said:
And is also awake, one might argue he has more reasonable excuse to be asleep gently trundling at five knots...
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Spot on. Anyway, getting out of the way of a 30 knot vessel, when you have right of way and should stand on until the last minute, would be rather like trying to dodge a bullet, give or take 450mph!
 
Oh come on guys, give the guy some slack. It's well reported it was down to the simple failure of his alarms, and I think he's being very humble about the whole thing. He must be absolutely gutted, I really feel for him.

I've met him and he's just a normal sailing club bloke. I've also sailed an IMOCA and they are beasts...what these guys do is amazing and I have nothing but respect for them. All it takes is a tiny mess up and things escalate...as Alex said it's a detail race and he failed to get the detail right. We've all made mistakes when we sail...it's human nature...however when you are singlehanded transocean on a boat that does 38knots those mistakes are just punished that much harder.

As for the two handed argument...Team Vestas anyone?
 
My old boss was a mine manager. His mine was in the third world but we regularly achieved a million man hours without a lost time accident. One of his secrets was not to give permanent employment to any probationer who had an accident. His view was that some people are just accident prone and they should not be put in a dangerous environment. Thirty years of observation later tells me he had a point - some people have multiple accidents and some have none. It strikes me that Alex has a lot of "rotten luck" and personally I would not employ him to charge round the oceans single handed however decent and normal he may be.
 
Halo said:
My old boss was a mine manager. His mine was in the third world but we regularly achieved a million man hours without a lost time accident. One of his secrets was not to give permanent employment to any probationer who had an accident. His view was that some people are just accident prone and they should not be put in a dangerous environment. Thirty years of observation later tells me he had a point - some people have multiple accidents and some have none. It strikes me that Alex has a lot of "rotten luck" and personally I would not employ him to charge round the oceans single handed however decent and normal he may be.
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He ain't the only one, you might find it difficult to find someone with experience to put on a monster flying machine of a boat solo who hasn't had some bangs along the way. If not they aren't pushing hard enough and won't win.
 
Halo said:
My old boss was a mine manager. His mine was in the third world but we regularly achieved a million man hours without a lost time accident. One of his secrets was not to give permanent employment to any probationer who had an accident. His view was that some people are just accident prone and they should not be put in a dangerous environment. Thirty years of observation later tells me he had a point - some people have multiple accidents and some have none. It strikes me that Alex has a lot of "rotten luck" and personally I would not employ him to charge round the oceans single handed however decent and normal he may be.
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I subscribe to the accident prone theory. It defies logic a little but some people seem immune to accidents but others chalk up regular ones, even if they're only walking down a normal street something happens to them.
 
Iain C said:
Oh come on guys, give the guy some slack. It's well reported it was down to the simple failure of his alarms, and I think he's being very humble about the whole thing. He must be absolutely gutted, I really feel for him.

I've met him and he's just a normal sailing club bloke. I've also sailed an IMOCA and they are beasts...what these guys do is amazing and I have nothing but respect for them. All it takes is a tiny mess up and things escalate...as Alex said it's a detail race and he failed to get the detail right. We've all made mistakes when we sail...it's human nature...however when you are singlehanded transocean on a boat that does 38knots those mistakes are just punished that much harder.

As for the two handed argument...Team Vestas anyone?
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I have nothing but respect for the guys that do these races single handed and I've met Alex when he was in Ardrossan with his old boat and thought he was a great guy but in this case it wasn't just failure of his alarm. He wasn't 100s of miles from land or the finish when he set his boat on a course that was in danger of hitting land if he didn't wake up and Gybe. That's the difference. He was 200 miles in front of his nearest competitor so didn't need to take any chances. He could have done the gybe then set his alarm and went for a sleep and if it failed he just kept going west, no danger apart from hitting another boat. That may well just have been a bad call caused by tiredness and fatigue but for me that's where the error was made not the failure of the alarm. He got off very lightly and could easily have been doing 20 knots when he ran into the cliffs, that would have been a completely different story.
 
Halo said:
It strikes me that Alex has a lot of "rotten luck" and personally I would not employ him to charge round the oceans single handed however decent and normal he may be.
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The boat delaminating was not his "fault". Neither was losing a foil or breaking the gooseneck or the keel mechanism falling apart. In hindsight yes there will be things he would have done differently no doubt, but he's not blaming anyone apart from himself and no doubt some big lessons will be learned.

I'm sure a lot of contributors on this forum would be just waaay better at racing a 60' rocketship of a boat singlehanded across the Atlantic with almost no sleep compared to Alex, but in the meantime I still say fair play to the guy.
 
I agree Alex is brilliant; had some bad luck but destined for the record books and sailing history; I may have reservations about singlehanding high speed machines around the place, but I have no reservations about the man, as an old friend said about my meeting Sir Alec Rose when I was a boy, ' if I were to shake his hand I wouldn't wash it for a week ! '
 
I don't think there's any doubt that this was an error. He selected a course that led into danger, because it was the fastest. AT is a hard-charger. In this case he failed to wake up. If you want to win races you have to go fast, which means taking risks and cutting things fine. If I were in the market for an IMOCA driver he'd be top of my list. Similarly to F1, you want someone who's fast, competitive and brave. Everything else can be learnt.
The accident-prone idea is an interesting one. Again in F1, there are drivers who crash more than others (anyone remember Andrea de Crasheris?) and who break down more than others. But is it bad luck or do they lack the tiniest edge of car control and sensitivity?
 
I can understand someone that pushes the boat until perhaps it breaks but in this case I can't understand why he chose the course he did plus sleeping when both 200 miles in front of his nearest opponent and within a few hours of the finish line.
 
StormNorm said:
I don't think there's any doubt that this was an error. He selected a course that led into danger, because it was the fastest. AT is a hard-charger. In this case he failed to wake up. If you want to win races you have to go fast, which means taking risks and cutting things fine. If I were in the market for an IMOCA driver he'd be top of my list. Similarly to F1, you want someone who's fast, competitive and brave. Everything else can be learnt.
The accident-prone idea is an interesting one. Again in F1, there are drivers who crash more than others (anyone remember Andrea de Crasheris?) and who break down more than others. But is it bad luck or do they lack the tiniest edge of car control and sensitivity?
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There was something on Radio4 yesterday, I think, about choosing fighter pilots in WWII. They were asked if they'd ever owned a motorbike, and if they still rode one. The right answer was to say yes to having had one, as it showed you were prepared to take risks, but no to still owning one, because that meant you understood danger.
I suspect IMOCA sailors need to have something of the same type of balance to win. No point going fastest if you don't get to the finish line.
 
StormNorm said:
I don't think there's any doubt that this was an error. He selected a course that led into danger, because it was the fastest. AT is a hard-charger. In this case he failed to wake up. If you want to win races you have to go fast, which means taking risks and cutting things fine. If I were in the market for an IMOCA driver he'd be top of my list. Similarly to F1, you want someone who's fast, competitive and brave.
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How "competitive" is running aground?
 
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