It might seem almost Spanish, but the 17-hour repair break at the Horn just under a week ago accelerated Telefonica like a stretched rubber band. The gap to Puma was once 400 miles, but at midnight tonight it was down to 16, so it's clear that the Spaniards, who have turned away from the coast and found a better wind out on the Atlantic, smell a rat. "We're horrified," said Puma skipper Ken Read. "Nobody has slept a wink. We're busting our arses, it's pretty much all we can do at the moment. Sometimes the wind gods favour you, sometimes they don't. Telefonica took a day and a half less than us to get here from the Horn. Nothing to do but plough."
But Puma is not completely out of the picture, because the wind is getting lighter and will change from south-west to north the closer the boats get to the finish. So it looks like a classic match race battle to the finish, with the difference that the last waypoint is still about 200 miles ahead. The finish is scheduled for late Friday afternoon and if you want to be there, you can watch the Tracker which now transmits the current positions of the combatants every minute.
If Telefonica could still win this leg after all they had experienced, it would probably be the feat of the race, made easier by the mast breakage on Groupama. The French team motored the 60 miles to Punta del Este on the Argentinian coast and, with the help of the ground crew, set up an emergency rig that is certainly better than minimum standard. Skipper Franck Cammas and his colleagues hope to complete the rest of the leg (approx. 670 miles) in order to finish ahead of Camper's New Zealand team and collect the 20 points for third place. Camper has a repaired racer with a full rig, but has to set off from the Chilean harbour of Puerto Montt, where a repair stop is known to have been made. In total, the Kiwis still have to sail 2800 miles to the finish, including the circumnavigation of Cape Horn.
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