Raucous cheering rang out at France’s Nantes Saint-Nazaire port on September 7 last, when Irish super sailor, Tom Dolan, crossed the finishing line in the 53rd La Solitaire du Figaro.
In a magnificent feat of skill, stamina, and sheer determination, the Meathman finished seventh in the three-stage race, which took place over three weeks, with 34 starters.
At times, conditions were brutally challenging. So much so, that at one point, the brave Irishman, tied to the helm of his boat (Smurfit Kappa-Kingspan) in ferocious weather, remained awake for more than 30 hours.
Recalling how his love of sailing began, he recalled his childhood in Moynalty, and his late father, who introduced him to the sport.
“When I was a kid, about nine, my aul lad got a notion and bought a wooden dinghy for a few hundred on the buy and sell.
"He fixed it up and took me out sailing. I remember the baling twine he’d tied to that boat, the blue twine. And the lake.”
He took a break from sailing in his teen years: “Nobody in Meath goes sailing in their teens,” he laughs. “But still, any chance I got, I’d fall back into it and I found it came very easily, very naturally for me. But you have to work at it.”
To get where he professionally takes guts and self-belief: “In Ireland, solo-sailing seems mad. So I had to leave and I moved to France with Glenans when I was 23 or 24.
“It was exciting. But as the years went by, I realised I was losing contact with people and that I’d sacrificed a lot in the move.” Regrets? “None. I could never have had a normal life. But what I’m doing now is very hard and sometimes I feel like I’m living on another planet.
“When I was in sailing circles back home in Ireland, I was the guy from the country with the weird accent and I didn’t fit in there. I wasn’t a member of a yacht or racing club.
“Over here [in France] I’m still an outsider, still trying to fit in. But in my sporting performance I do fit in.”
Solo racing for weeks on end isn’t sleep-friendly. But Dolan uses autopilot to power nap.
“I set my alarm for 20 minutes and doze off.” What would happen if a solo sailor were to snooze for six hours straight? “He’d be last,” he replies.
Has he sailed past other solo sailors who were clearly snoozing too long?
“I know of one lad who slept for an hour in a race. But we [solo race competitors] watch out for each other. If we were all going one way and it was night and one boat was going in the opposite direction towards land, we’d call that sailor on the radio and ask if everything was alright.”
Did he ever oversleep that way? “No. Never.”
Asked if sailing solo for a prolonged period in bad weather might drive an exhausted sailor into dark waters, mentally, he affirms, “Not in the sort of racing I do,” before telling me about the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race (the first non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world yacht race), and the dastardly toll it took on participant Daniel Crowhurst, who sacrificed everything, then paid the ultimate price.
On the theme of isolation at sea, Dolan shares that when solo-racing, competitor boats are regularly near to one another.
I wonder whether they’re so close a ball could be thrown from one boat to another (it could) and whether sailors ever shout to or at adjacent competitors (they don’t, although some yelling between the racers is occasionally heard coming up to the finishing line of the final race).
I ask what was the toughest for him during the three-week long race he’s just completed, the mental or physical toll, or whether they’re irrevocably intertwined. “The fatigue during the last leg of the race,” he replies.
“Weather determines when I sleep or rest. But when racing down to the north of Spain, there was a shifty wind, and then a really strong wind on the return. So there was no time to sleep at all.
“At one stage, the wind was so extreme, I went at least 30 hours without sleep. When I began hallucinating from exhaustion, I’d shout out loud and sing and slap myself across the face, to stay alert. My brain was so tired I was dreaming while awake.” Does exhaustion kill the appetite? “It does. I had to force myself to eat.”
There were good times too. When the weather allowed Dolan while racing would listen to music (The Saw Doctors) and comedy (Tommy Tiernan).
We talk more about solo racing and I glean that when he’s out at sea, he prefers sunrise to sunset. He doesn’t eat fish on his boat when racing. But that doesn’t mean he’s superstitious because he isn’t, although he wouldn’t change the name of a boat.
Does stuff sometimes stop working, while he’s out racing alone? “Things do break. I had to give up a race once when my mast broke.”
Of course, while he sails solo, Dolan has a team following him.
“They help with the tech side of things and with communications and finance. But while I’ve a team on land, at sea I am master of all that’s on board. Having no one to blame but myself, is the ultimate challenge and so much more intense.” It’s clear that he loves every minute, and that he can depend on himself and he does.
Of his sponsors: Smurfit Kappa and Kingspan, he says: “I’m grateful to them, for believing in and investing in me. They’ve been great motivators for me.”
Of course, Dolan believed in himself from the outset, long before the sponsors came along.
I used most of my inheritance from my father, to buy not a house, but a boat. There were times when I came so close to financial ruin I came close to giving up.
“In the early years, 2014-2017, things were getting quite hairy. They were difficult times. But I got sponsorship in 2017 and by 2018 I was fully professional and I stopped having to borrow money.”
What propelled him up and out of the green fields of Co Meath and over to France and into professional sailing?
“I didn’t want to be a farmer. I didn’t like the hard work. All that wet and cold,” he says and he’s laughing. He pauses then while we both consider his current working conditions. “Yeah,” he says. “And look where I ended up.”
Tom talks highly of his girlfriend — French native, Karine: "She supports me. We met back when I first started. She was boat hitch-hiking at the time and she hitched a sail with me.” While serendipity seems to have played a role in Tom Dolan’s life, he doesn’t believe in destiny.
“I’m made for doing what I do. I couldn’t do anything else. If you go hard enough at anything, do everything to get it, give it all the energy you have, you’ll get there in the end.”
