Peachy Ahoy: Franck Cammas – turning potential disaster into triumph Our Coverage Sponsored by Stribling and Associates
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The countdown continues to the Louis Vuitton America’s World Series Toulon and we are now mere days away from the America’s Cup’s return to the Mediterranean. Attention will be closely focused on the six America’s Cup teams as they pick up the battles where they left off in Portsmouth, but none more so than on Franck Cammas, Skipper of Groupama Team France and a true French sailing legend who will be fighting for the honour of the Tricolour in front of his team’s home fans.
Franck’s appearance in Toulon, and his participation in the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series events this year, is a truly remarkable story, one known within the sport of competitive sailing, but to the wider world, it is a tale that needs to be told.
At the end of November 2015 Franck was on the water near Quiberon, France, sailing a GC32 foiling catamaran as part of the team’s ongoing preparations for the 2016 America’s Cup. For most of his career, which includes a win in the grueling Volvo Ocean Race, Franck had avoided serious injury, an astonishing statistic for someone who has sailed more than 320 days each year throughout his career, but one day in November that changed.
The boat he was helming was moving along at over 35 knots, incredibly fast by any standards, when Franck fell into the water and his right leg struck the boat’s rudder. At that sort of speed serious injury was inevitable, so Franck was airlifted to hospital where it became evident that he would not lose his foot, but he would be out of action for many months.
At the time, Franck was not only planning his America’s Cup campaign, he was also preparing for the 2016 Olympic Games where he had planned to compete in the Nacra 17 class. This injury put paid to his Rio ambitions, and kept him out of the water for nearly five months, a lifetime in an America’s Cup campaign that is measured by those involved in minutes and hours, not months and years, as each second of preparation is so valuable.
Instead of taking this setback as limiting his physical preparations, Franck switched his attention to learning more about the mechanical elements of his sport that are so valuable at the cutting edge of competition, using the time his injury kept him from sailing or physical training to educate himself more about the engineering aspects of boat design, manufacture and testing. This deeper understanding, effectively putting himself into the mindset of a engineer (he did mathematics in school), will undoubtedly prove useful in his role as Skipper of a team competing in the 35th America’s Cup campaign, especially in a sport where the margins between winning and losing can be infinitesimally small.
Remember all of this the next time Groupama Team France and Franck Cammas are out on the water racing. Less than a year ago the team’s Skipper was involved in an accident so severe he was told he would not be losing his foot – even though that is obviously good news, it is the sort of accident that would keep mere mortals away from the cause of the accident for many years, perhaps even for ever. For an America’s Cup Skipper it was a chance to learn even more about his sport.
Allez les Bleus!
