The American site Sailing Anarchy refutes the breakage of Hugo Boss' starboard foil and starts the rumour that the sailor has a spare foil on board. Skeptical, the web review contacted the British skipper's technical team to obtain a photo of the broken foil, which would confirm the breakage.
Indeed, there are rumours that Alex Thomson did not break his foil. It would be a technique to destabilise the sailor in the black boat against his rivals. Others say that Alex would have had another foil on board and changed the damaged one.
The technical team assured the American site that the English skipper had indeed damaged his appendix, but had not yet been able to take a photo. Indeed, sailing at more than 20 knots with the foil submerged, he has not yet been able to photograph his foil and is expecting more moderate conditions.
The Vendée Globe race management ensures that it is quite possible to have a spare foil on board. So would that be Hugo Boss's secret? Once again, the shore crew denies the information. At the same time, knowing that a foil weighs more than 100 kg, and in spite of the size of the British sailor, it would still be implausible that he would have been able to carry out the change himself, especially at the speeds at which he sailed down the Atlantic Ocean.
Then how come Alex Thomson is still leading the fleet? The Telegram interviewed the architect Vincent Lauriot Prévost, one of Hugo Boss's architects along with Guillaume Verdier. The latter explains that for the moment, the leaders - all of whom have hydrofoil boats - are not in points of sail that require the use of their appendages. On the other hand, when the wind is lighter, the end of the foil dragging through the water is likely to slow him down.
"It is not at all illogical that the first three have similar speeds for the simple reason that they are not in conditions where they use foils. Le Cléac'h and Josse have retracted foils and Thomson has a damaged foil and therefore reduced. Upwind, he'll be missing a little leg." explains the architect to the Telegram.
