Dear readers,

I'm not interested in the European Football Championship. Actually. Well, maybe if Germany is in a decisive match, then I'll get carried away and watch it, I don't want to be lonely. The nice thing is that sailors don't need to buy fan merchandise, it's already hanging on the stern. And when a goal is scored, you just cheekily lift the Adenauer, wave it and put it away again, and you're there. But a fan?

The European Championship and similar events with a tendency towards mass hysteria and additional noise are repugnant to me, to put it mildly. I don't need a vuvuzela, a foghorn is enough for me. I simply don't like bawling in the harbour or even in the anchorage, and hopefully many sailors will feel the same way. If not, it doesn't matter, the European Championship is over quickly, and what are noise-cancelling headphones or gin and tonic for?

These days, however, other events have a lot of potential, especially from a German perspective. We're talking - oh, wonder of wonders - about sailing, more specifically the Vendée Globe, epitomised by Boris Herrmann. And that's what sport is mostly about as a spectator: we need a figure of identification, someone we can root for. Without taking sides, without being in favour of someone, sport is demonstrably not exciting.

Now it is relatively easy to root for one or more representatives of your own country in a national competition, they have qualified by virtue of being part of the national team and that's it.

The individual sailing professional makes it more difficult. The average cruising sailor maintains a certain distance from high-end racing, and arguments such as "they only increase our insurance premiums", "in an emergency, they endanger the rescue teams", and most recently "they slaughter whales with their foils" are quickly heard. Or the average person even sees the yachts as too far removed from conventional sailing to experience ocean racing as a fan sport.

Boris Herrmann has certainly managed to inspire a large number of sailors and non-sailors alike with his enthusiasm for our sport. Never before has our sport been so widely and extensively reported on in non-sailing media, and never before have professional sailors achieved such a high level of interest and acceptance in Germany. And rightly so. The Hamburg native ultimately became famous for his tragic final hours at the Vendée 2020/21, when he was in a podium position and collided with a fishing boat during the last hundred nautical miles before the finish and fell back to fifth place. The typical tragic hero. Back then.

Boris has been able to beat all the French favourites with his two most recent Transat participations at the latest, taking first place in both qualifying regattas combined. Now they even call him the "Herrmannator" in France. Now he has moved from the wider circle of favourites for the Vendée Globe to the inner circle and has a chance of becoming not only the first German, but also the first non-Frenchman to take the crown in solo sailing. Briton Alex Thomson has tried this repeatedly and has become an icon of the sport despite, yes, failure in his home country and even France.

And now Boris can ascend to Olympus. That somehow makes me more proud than any goal or even winning the European Championship title!

Fridtjof Gunkel,

Deputy Editor-in-Chief of YACHT

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