“The only thing we know how to do, is to go in a straight line at 40 knots. Here you have to know how to extricate yourselves from a fleet of over 500 boats, find wind where there isn’t any, accept that you’re going to lose a boat length in order to gain two.. It’s a whole different ball game and something I have a great deal of respect for!” The description comes from the Breton sailor Alain Thébault, skipper of Hydroptère and patron of this 68th version of the Geneva Bol d’Or Rolex. Alain, who is working with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne takes in the pontoons of « lanautique » with amused surprise.

575 skippers and as many boats are currently undergoing registration and boat launchings. Toucans, 6 mJ, large and small ‘Surprises’, Psaros 40 .welcome their crews one by one in a great flurry of mainsail and solent tests. The Bol d’or Rolex is a real festival of sailing with sailors from all over Switzerland and Europe. The sailors’ true motivation is almost forgotten amidst the good humour reigning on the lake; that is an annual sporting challenge wide open to the vagaries of the weather and the changing pace of the miles in the shadow of the omnipresent mountains. “This year is a very good vintage” observes Thierry Chapatte, President of the Organisation Committee, “We are quantitatively in the upper bracket, playing host to increasingly homogenous classes, for a real sporting competition where the logic of the class measurement is respected.”

“Each year, we hear it said that the Swiss side has the advantage, then it’s the French.”. The Fécamp sailor Xavier Lecoeur, winner of the Québec Saint Malo 2000 in a 60 footer, has come to Geneva for the second year running to rub shoulders with a fleet of over 100 Surprises, the ‘darlings’ of the Bol d’Or Rolex. “The Bol d’or Rolex is an incredibly demanding race, both as a result of the number of competitors who literally helm the entire width of the lake, and because they do battle in light, fickle winds on an enclosed race zone. This requires high vigilance and a very particular kind of observation. A lot of the elementary rules of racing are rewritten here.”

Participating in the Bol d’Or Rolex for the fourth time, Loïck Peyron will be attempting to rewrite the old saying, as Ernesto Bertarelli has already done, which states that whoever wins the ‘Genève-Rolle-Genève’ race, will not win the Bol d’Or. “We won here just last weekend on Nicolas Grange’s D 35 Okalys. We’ll be trying to contain the attack from Alain Gautier, Russell Coutts and Ernesto Bertarelli” explains Loïck, an enthusiast of the Léman races for over 10 years.

The ‘forecast’ is a word that is always received with a smile here. The 2005 version of the Bol d’Or Rolex was marked by the records for slowness. The forecasts for 0900 hours tomorrow morning don’t auger well for wind and the records in the 7 registered classes* (plus the two multihull classes) don’t look likely to topple. For now a stormy mist has settled over the lake. Just 5 knots of SW’ly will provide downwind conditions for the start. From that point competitors will have to deal with the stormy local phenomena and, tomorrow, it’s the quality of the sailors’ observations on the water that will make the difference.

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