A Challenging Ocean Race Produces an Unlikely Winner

Three cheers for old folks. When the towering sloop Ericsson 3 crossed the finish line in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday to win the longest leg ever in the Volvo Ocean Race, the guy behind the wheel was also the oldest and unlikeliest winner. Magnus Olsson, in his sixth 'round-the-world race but his first as skipper, turned 60 on Jan. 4. Sixty!

The shaggy-haired Swede is known by grand prix sailors across the globe as the brightest bulb on any vessel, cheery even in the cruelest conditions. But no one anywhere imagined that "Mangy," as he's affectionately called, and his 10 Nordic mates could win the Homeric, 41-day, 12,500-mile slog around Cape Horn from Qingdao, China.

With good reason. When Ericsson 3 left, it was a wreck. A terrible pounding in fierce winds on the short leg from Singapore to Qingdao had opened a gaping crack near the bow. The crew had to detour to Taiwan to make repairs. They worked around the clock, finishing so late they didn't get to the finish line until five hours after the rest of the fleet had restarted for Rio.

It took two more hours to stock provisions and take on a few new crew, then set off in hot pursuit, seven hours back and still sweeping up carbon fiber dust in the cabin.

It was hard to convince the crew they weren't on a suicide mission, Olsson said by phone from Rio, where celebrations were in full swing. "In the South China Sea on the way to Qingdao, it was pretty dramatic. We were about to sink," he said. "So it was stressful to explain to them that the boat was safe for the Southern Ocean," considered the world's most challenging sea.

They may have been skeptical, but the crew managed to whip the fractured craft along hard enough to catch up. Three weeks into the leg, they were second, at which point navigator Aksel Magdahl made a bold call that changed the game completely.

Prevailing wisdom when sailing the Southern Ocean from west to east is to go as far south as you dare, where winds are stronger and conditions more favorable as long as you don't hit ice. But Magdahl saw a big high-pressure system lurking there on weather maps and, fearing light winds, turned north.

The rest of the fleet went south, and early position reports saw Ericsson 3 drop from second to dead last. But when the southern fleet hit the high, Olsson and his Scandinavian crew soared out to a 280-mile lead they never relinquished.

"Going north didn't seem special at the time," Magdahl said, "but when all the rest didn't follow us then it suddenly seemed a big decision and very important."

The upshot was that when Ericsson 3 arrived in Rio, it was so far ahead of second-place sister ship Ericsson 4, with five-time Olympic medalist Torben Grael at the helm, "We'll have the mast and the keel off and be working on them before they get here," said Olsson with a laugh.

Oh, he was crowing. "I'm proud of myself," the skipper said. "We've been fighting like crazy. The hardest part was to keep the boat together, not push over the limit and destroy it."

He looked back fondly on rounding Cape Horn at the tip of South America, the most feared headland on Earth. "A few days before we got there it was pretty rough--we saw 55 knots of wind and the sea was crazy. It was really dangerous to be on deck. I was afraid someone would be washed off.

"But at Cape Horn the wind was down to 25 to 30 knots and we had the big kite [spinnaker] up. We could see the rock [Cape Horn] appearing and disappearing through the rain squalls. It was a lot of fun for the rookies. They were full of joy."

It was the sixth time Olsson had rounded the Horn in the Volvo, which used to be called the Whitbread Race and is the world's premier 'round-the-world sailing event. After each of the past three races, the aging sailor has vowed to hang it up, but he just can't seem to do it. "This is it, Angus, I swear to you," he told me from Rio. "I would love to be involved in the next one, but not as a sailor."

We shall see . . .

The race restarts April 11, bound across the hated, light-air doldrums to Boston, where a winner is expected around April 27. The fleet will be back up to seven boats as Delta Lloyd and Telefonica Black rejoin. Both were severely damaged on the Singapore-Qingdao leg and couldn't be repaired in time for the leg to Rio.

Boston replaced Baltimore/Annapolis as the U.S. stopover. The Chesapeake played host to the fleet three times starting in 1993-94 but lost the bid to New England when U.S. entry Puma joined the race. Puma represents the Boston-based shoe company by the same name and has several New Englanders on the crew, including skipper Ken Read of Newport, R.I.