LITMIR.BIZ

      In constant use for success.

      PROLOGUE

      BY

      JOCHEN RIEKER

      It would be easy to believe that Germany’s best sailors are related, as all of their names end with »-mann«. There’s Wilfried Erdmann, the extreme sailor, one of fewer than a dozen people to have circumnavigated the globe against the prevailing winds without making a single stop. There’s Jochen Schümann, three-time Olympic champion and the sole German America’s Cup winner to date. And there’s Boris Herrmann, high-sea professional, recordchaser and solo skipper.

      The youngest of the top sailors, he has turned what could have been written off as a coincidence into a minor series, a kind of unwritten law. And it’s not just his name that positions him snugly between the other greats, one of whom he admired even as a child for his sailing feats, while teaming up with the other as a navigator and winning renowned high-sea regattas – more of which later on. And even if he’s very different, both as a person and a top sportsman, he has been operating for some time on a similarly rarefied level as these exceptional seamen.

      A NEW ERA?

      »Maybe,« news magazine »Der Spiegel« wrote in 2008, »a new era has begun with Boris Herrmann.« He had just made his Class40 début and taken a sensational second place in the Artemis Transat, a notoriously tough single-handed race across the North Atlantic. And this was just the beginning.

      In the past ten years, the native of Oldenburg has made first- and second-place finishes by the dozen. He is the first German to have won a round-the-world regatta. The first to have gained international recognition in the Imoca60 class. The only one to have sailed non-stop around the world three times, the first time in 100 days, and the second in an unbelievable 47 and now in 80 days.

      He could even have been the first German to win the Jules Verne Trophy with the fastest circumnavigation under sail power in a fabulous 40 days. But shortly before the winning passage of Francis Joyon’s Idec Sport, on which he was due to sail, he signed off. A decision he didn’t make lightly – that’s not his style – he had no alternative.

      The fact was that Boris Herrmann’s first Vendée Globe project was starting at the same time, and this was his big dream, his ultimate goal and his true destiny.

      It is one of the stories told in this book. The greatest challenge he has ever faced: single-handed, non-stop around the great capes, through doldrums and storms, pitching back and forth between total exhaustion and indescribable euphoria on a lightning-fast, incredibly complex, inhumanly sparse carbon-fibre yacht on foils.

      What kind of person aspires to such a goal? What’s required to pass such a test? Or rather: to pass with flying colours? Where does a drive like this come from? The book also grapples with these questions.

      It’s Boris’s own story, in his own words, bolstered by appraisals and anecdotes from his most significant companions. A very personal, exceptionally open and manylayered sailing book that adds a number of facets to the public and published image of the 39-year-old sailing hero.

      LESS LINEAR THAN IT SEEMS

      It

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