SEE MORE PHOTOS
“Are you ready to grind?” I’d blush at this cheeky come-on in any other setting, but when it’s British skipper Alex Thomson — a major talent in international yacht racing — who’s asking, I’m happy to oblige. At the winch of a 60-foot monohull racing yacht, I’m grinding away to help Thomson and his crew pull in and let out sails as we tack and jibe our way through a sun-splashed afternoon in Burrard Inlet.
The charismatic 38-year-old with tossled blond hair and a gap-toothed grin is in Vancouver this week with his eight-tonne carbon fibre yacht courtesy of fashion house Hugo Boss, his sponsor for the past decade. Fresh off his third-place finish in the prestigious Vendée Globe — a round-the-world single-handed yacht race held once every four years — Thomson is spending the summer on a customer engagement tour, charming media and VIPs aboard his black and white boat.
It’s the first time for the race yacht on the West Coast of North America. The Imoca 60’s tour started in Rio de Janeiro in February. After Vancouver, she will set sail for Seattle and wind her way down to San Francisco, host city for the America’s Cup.
Thomson is a yacht-racing phenom who at 25 became the youngest ever skipper to win a round-the-world race. In 2009, he made waves when he walked the keel of his race yacht, dressed suavely in a Hugo Boss suit. Critics doubted the stunt’s authenticity and claimed his James Bond-worthy feat was a Photoshop fake.
“That pissed me off,” says Thomson, chatting amiably about his daredevil streak. He made sure Take 2 of the keel walk, in 2011, was captured on video, with slight modifications: a sewn-on suit (buttons blew off hitting the water the first time) and boarding the keel by jet ski instead of Zodiac (“safer,” he says). During its visit, the Hugo Boss was moored at North Vancouver’s Mosquito Creek Marina.
