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and 45 seconds.

      Not only that: Herrmann has written sailing history.

      He‘s the first German to take part in the classic ocean race in which barely more than half of the field usually makes it to the finish. He managed this on his very first attempt, hoisting the black, red and gold flag into the hazy January sky on entering the channel of Les Sables.

      Taking 5th place in the tightest sprint to the finish ever seen in the Vendée Globe, the man from Hamburg is now unquestionably one of the best solo skippers in the world. This was the position he had hoped for before the start, but only made this public shortly before Cape Horn. Finishing the race was his primary goal, as he told Yacht in an interview, with the result “depending very much on fortune”.

      NOW HE HAS DONE IT

      Boris Herrmann, already long established as by far Germany’s most successful ocean sailor, has fulfilled and exceeded all expectations. Even the German Chancellor congratulated him on his “fantastic achievement”. In Germany, Angela Merkel let him know, “we were right there with you”. And even this is an understatement: half of the nation was electrified.

      That same day, Niels Annen, Secretary of State in the Foreign Office, nominated Herrmann for the Federal Cross of Merit. Drawing comparisons with the “summer fairytale” of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, some observers have dubbed this the winter fairytale that had the country holding its breath. Newspapers, magazines, TV news, sports programmes and talk shows will be celebrating the finish like a victory for weeks to come.

      Almost 20 years after the triumph of Team Illbruck in the Volvo Ocean Race, sailing has finally experienced another great moment, a Boris moment, greater than nearly all the other successes to date – perhaps also because things were not looking so good for quite a while, with this ninth Vendée Globe so punishing for its participants, and Herrmann needing a long time to move up in the race, and because the collision with a fishing trawler in the night before the finish could have dashed all hope.

      His ambivalence is palpable this morning, with the orange-red plumes and phosphorous fumes from the smoke fountains and torches marking his arrival in the channel of Les Sables now only a memory. His team has been celebrating with him for two nights, even as he nodded off in his chair and took himself off to bed soon after. His abrupt landing in his new, old life must make him feel like he’s in a film that has been speeded up to an uncomfortable degree. Or like a sudden emergency brake.

      LOOK BACK FORWARD

      The race – his race – is over. The fight for the highest possible placing, his worries about the boat, being alone, the exhaustion from sleeping in half-hour stretches for weeks on end, interpreting mostly difficult weather conditions, and the sheer mass of all the privations that can hardly be measured – all of this now lies astern. But of course he’s feeling it all still. He has not yet sorted, evaluated, processed and settled it. It will take some time for his head, body and soul to be over all the stress and strain.

      “A few weeks” Herrmann reckons. Some former participants talk in terms of months. Four years ago, Conrad Coleman needed “more than half a year”.

      Ahead of Boris Herrmann now there lies a new beginning, and an in-between. Less adrenaline, few endorphins, no existential experiences at the limit. But no holiday either, no down time. For him, the professional sailor, the end of the Vendée Globe also means the end of his pay, the expiry of his sponsorship contracts, and the need to develop new prospects for himself and his co-workers.

      The world had been cheering him on, up to the day before last. His popularity, increased enormously by his Atlantic crossing with Greta Thunberg, has reached a new height – this will make a lot of things easier. He’s seen as a model athlete in a sport that is still fresh to the media: smart, likeable, honest, telegenic.

      However, for the moment these are only possibilities, opportunities, chances – not pay cheques he can use to cover his bills and support his family. This, too, is a reality to which Boris Herrmann has returned.

      Marie Louise, known to all as simply Malou, is meanwhile crawling across the cold parquet flooring in her pink romper suit. She didn’t sleep well and was up early. Herrmann’s wife Birte has brought their eight-month-old daughter down to the living room. Seeing her Daddy, she smiles.

      Yes! That‘s why we are doing it …

      He’s also having trouble adjusting to the sudden calm. Too many thoughts are jostling inside him. They’ve pushed him out of bed already. At the forefront: the images from the collision. How his Seaexplorer – Yacht Club de Monaco, which he had brought around the world with such skill, is now, just 90 sea miles short of the finish, hanging alongside the steel hull of a Biscayan fishing trawler, the bowsprit shattered, the foresail torn on the fishing gear, the starboard foil broken.

      “Whenever I’m not otherwise distracted, I’m asking myself what could have been if that hadn’t happened. What a podium finish could have meant, which was absolutely on the cards,” the 39-year-old reflects. “Has this really cost me?”

      And another thought: immediately after the crash, when he was on the forecastle retrieving the hanging shreds of the foresail, in a three-meter swell, and surveying the damage to the bowsprit, it suddenly hit him: “That’s that. There goes the small financial standby that I wanted to set aside as starting capital for the next months after the race.”

      Then he shakes himself, puts his shoulders back, smiles a little even though this doesn’t make his worries go away, and looks out the window as if the assurance that he needs now is out there somewhere: “I don’t know how we’re going to manage it,” he says. “But we’ll get there somehow.”

      This is the adaptability, the resilience, what he himself sometimes refers to as “my stubbornness”, that has accompanied Boris Herrmann throughout the entire Vendée Globe. Sometimes it was really more like being dragged along, so exceptionally hard and unrelenting was the race.

      This is how the native of Oldenburg described it, practically unfiltered, almost from the very start. He never kept his doubts and struggles to himself, not even his worries about material matters.

      Even in the first night at sea, in the first cold front of the Vendée, the first of many to come, he wrote on board: “It’s bumpy, and for safety’s sake I’m holding the speed at 20 knots. Compare Thomas (Ruyant) on Linked-Out, who is logging 27 knots at times. I don‘t believe this is sustainable. Wave from the front. Almost impossible to type.”

      Two days later, after the front, he reports in a video: “For a while I’ve been sailing with three reefs (in the mainsail) and no foresail, in winds of around 40 knots. This is the Vendée Globe. My doubts have been gnawing at me a little. I haven’t slept at all. I couldn’t sleep.”

      On this day, 11 November, Jérémie Beyou, the race’s big favourite, announces that he is turning back. One of the two rudder blades of his Charal is damaged, and fittings have been ripped from the deck. Sailing on would be irresponsible. Beyou returns to Les Sables d’Olonne, has repairs done, starts again, but has no chance from here onwards.

      His setback is an early sign of the difficulty of this Vendée. And a warning for Herrmann, whose main goal is to sail to the finish. “Avoid indiscriminate risk at all costs!”

      EVERYTHING ELSE THAN IDEAL

      Around the Cape Verde islands, a hurricane moving eastwards from the Caribbean is waiting along the skippers’ racing line. Already the second storm in the North Atlantic. Briton Alex Thomson, Herrmann’s friend, boldly sails close to its eye. A coup de main. This gives him the lead, which he then manages to extend. But even the skipper of the highly-innovative Hugo Boss cannot set a new best time for reaching the equator. He’s three days behind the race record of 2016, and five behind the high expectations.

      New, much longer

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