Barcelona World Race Winner Finishes

After three months and more than 25,000 miles, the inaugural edition of the Barcelona World Race — a doublehanded, non-stop race around the world — is finally over for the winning team. Jean-Pierre Dick and Damian Foxall aboard the Open 60 Paprec-Virbac 2, will cross the finish line today off Barcelona after 92 days at sea. The talented pair took over the lead several weeks into the race after the favored PRB team was dismasted and retired. Dick and Foxall were threatened several times by the British team aboard Hugo Boss, who muscled their way from last to second by the halfway point, but PV-2 never relinquished the lead. The Boss-boys, Alex Thomson and Andrew Cape, should arrive Wednesday to lay official claim to that hard-earned second. The tail-end boat, Educación Sin Fronteras is still 3,900 miles, one ocean and about three weeks away from the finish.

With four of the original nine starters retiring due to breakage, and so much else happening here and abroad since the November 11 start of the Barcelona World Race (oil spill, IDEC’s round-the-world dash, Christmas, etc.), it was easy to let this event fall off our (and your) radar. However, whenever we found time to check in at the official website, we quickly got ‘re-hooked’. Before you, too, get sidetracked, we urge you to give it a look (www.barcelonaworldrace.com), and particularly to check out the Race Documentary series, under ‘How To Follow’. These high-quality half-hour shorts — in English — not only show these incredible boats doing what they do best (going fast), but really bring out the personalities and unique interaction of the doublehanded crews.