Meghan McCain wrote on Friday that she may consider leaving the Republican Party if it doesn’t change some of its political stances.

McCain, who is an MSNBC contributor, has called herself a “proud moderate” who gets treated like a “freak” in her own party, and she’s famously done battle with conservative pundits like Laura Ingraham.

Writing for the Daily Beast, McCain said that Mitt Romney’s loss was “the first time that I considered that the Republican Party, which I love so much, might die.”

She said the party needed to tone down its focus on social issues and concentrate on the economy. Then, she said if it failed to do so, she might leave.

“If we don’t move forward, adapt, and become relevant again, the Republican Party isn’t going to survive,” she wrote. “It will just continue to alienate more moderate voters like myself. If I don’t see some changes in the next four years, I’m going to consider registering as an Independent in 2016.”

Read the full op-ed here.

Copyright. 2012. Huffington Post.com All Rights Reserved

Marla Maples, former wife of Donald Trump, at her Calabasas, Calif., home.

Marla Maples Finds Her Groove

By JUDITH NEWMAN

THERE are many things I might expect Marla Maples to explain to me, but the laws of kashrut are not among them. The former Mrs. Donald Trump had made a reservation at Prime Grill in Manhattan and texted, “Let’s wear hats!” Only when I got there did I realize the steakhouse was kosher. (She was indeed wearing a hat, but it was more fedora than skullcap.)

I was roundly ignored by the host, but when Ms. Maples strode in in her leggings, cashmere sweater, bomber jacket and leather boots, we were immediately seated. The mostly male diners stopped in mid-chew to gape; she didn’t notice.

“I don’t eat dairy, so this is a great place to be if I want to eat meat, because they don’t mix milk and meat here,” Ms. Maples, a kabbalista, said delightedly. As it happens, “delighted” is her default expression. It’s not just that, at 49, she is shockingly gorgeous. Maybe it’s the early beauty pageant training, or all that practice smiling in front of the carnivorous paparazzi, or maybe it’s her recent decision to move back to New York City after years of a kind of self-imposed exile in Los Angeles.

Whatever the case, the woman radiates a certain fizzy joy. I remember how unflappable she was, even at 24, in the eye of one of the biggest sex scandals of the 1990s, a moment that has some resonance amid this week’s fevered coverage of the David H. Petraeus-Paula Broadwell affair. Back then, a typical day for Ms. Maples would be paparazzi barking questions like this: “Did Donald ever moan, ‘Oh, Ivana’?”

If you weren’t in a coma during the ’90s, you know Ms. Maples. The aspiring actress’s affair with the mogul 17 years her senior that precipitated the “divorce of the century”; the confrontation on the slopes of Aspen (Marla to Ivana: “Are you in love with your husband? Because I am.”); the breakups; the engagements; the “Dynasty” hair; the breakups again; the pregnancy; and the 1993 wedding at the Plaza, the details of which are known to every self-respecting “bridezilla.” The 20-carat diamond tiara, the white double-laced Carolina Herrera gown, the contemptuous comments. “I give it four months,” Howard Stern said.

He was off by a few years (they divorced in 1999), but his point was well taken: This marriage didn’t really have “Till death do us part” written all over it. Still, for a few not-so-halcyon years, the “Georgia Peach” was the biggest news-media draw in America.

Ms. Maples has always been a romantic figure to me. I believe that for all Mr. Trump’s wealth, she married for love, and it always seemed that she was in love. She never cashed in all that much: there have been no Playboy centerfolds (she was offered $1 million), no tell-all, no reality shows. “Who needed that, when my life used to be a reality show?” she said.

If she was a gold digger, she wasn’t a very good one: according to press reports, she ended up with about $2 million, the Trump equivalent of throwing her the change found under the sofa cushions. And she still resists exploiting her relatively brief fling as the other woman.

“It was such a painful time,” she said. “All those years in the press pretty much ripped my heart out.” She is reluctant to comment on today’s scandals. Of the general and his biographer, she said only: “There is so much in the world that is negative and judgmental right now. I feel uncomfortable being brought into the private recesses of someone’s personal life when uninvited.”

Mr. Trump did leave her with the one asset she can’t live without: their daughter, Tiffany Ariana, a lovely girl with a blond mane and bee-stung lips who looks as if Mr. Trump and Ms. Maples were Photoshopped into one. In 1998 Ms. Maples took her daughter, who was then 5, and headed for Los Angeles. Not only because she said she needed a new start, but also because she wanted her daughter “to grow up in a place where her name wouldn’t make her such a standout, and where we wouldn’t be followed around.”

But this fall Ms. Maples decided it was time to return to New York. Her daughter was going to college, and “she really was raised by me, with my father and my friends,” Ms. Maples said. “She hasn’t seen her father much throughout the years. But now, she wants to get to know him better.” It’s a tough balancing act. Ms. Maples and Mr. Trump are politically on opposite ends of the spectrum, and when he began his election Twitter dispatches, Ms. Maples decided the less she knew the better. “Tiffany knew about his ‘October surprise’ and I didn’t want to even discuss it with her. She loves her father and wants to support him.”

Ms. Maples is only now taking on meetings, agents, managers, endorsement deals for wellness products. (For the love of God, someone should hire this woman for a skin care line. She has no pores.) Hollywood brought bit parts; more than anything the former “Will Rogers Follies” girl would like to be back on Broadway. She is writing New Age “chill-out” music; a track from her new album, “The Endless,” features Deepak Chopra and LogiQ Pryce and is the first Indian-rapper mash-up I have heard in, well, forever. Next summer she is working with Globunity, a peace symposium scheduled to take place in Florence, Italy. Her title is “director of inspirational leaders.”

It has been a tough year for Ms. Maples. Her father had a small stroke. Her mother was told she had breast cancer. In June, Chuck Jones, the publicist from the Trump years who went to prison for stealing and having “a sexual relationship” with her shoes, was again arrested, on charges of sending her threatening e-mails.

In a sign that she may not have the best judgment when it comes to managing her career, a personal assistant admitted to running up thousands of dollars on Ms. Maples’s unused credit cards to buy designer clothing, Botox and breast augmentation. She and her daughter loved the assistant, she said, and she is distraught, but is trying to make light of it. “I always complimented her on her style,” she said. “I didn’t know I was paying for it.”

“But you know, I still believe in people,” she said. “I still want to help people become all they can in the world. And I feel like New York’s the best place to do it.”

She is single. “I’m not looking, but I’m allowing,” she said carefully. And she is convinced that her next partner will not have much familiarity with a boardroom. “Over the years so many people wanted to introduce me to these wealthy, powerful, men, but, no,” she said. “With Donald, you know, I saw a real positive light in him. I could see the goodness, and we had this connection. It just happened that he had money. And money and power truly got in the way of the love that we had, to be very honest. If anything, it destroyed it.”

“New York” (1911) is part of the “George Bellows” multigallery retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which features portraits, landscapes and city life by Bellows, who died at 42. More Photos »

Restless in Style and Subject

By ROBERTA SMITH

Just after the American painter George Bellows died of a ruptured appendix at the age of 42, in 1925, the playwright Sherwood Anderson offered a poignant assessment. Anderson wrote that Bellows’s last paintings “keep telling you things. They are telling you that Mr. George Bellows died too young. They are telling you that he was after something, that he was always after it.”

Whatever Bellows was after, he pursued it restlessly, not just in his final canvases but through most of his busy and multifaceted, if truncated, career, and only rarely did he catch up with it. This is the ultimate message of “George Bellows,” an unnecessarily disappointing retrospective that has come to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the National Gallery in Washington. Organized by Charles Brock, an associate curator there, it contains some 70 oils and 30 works on paper. Still, there is a good chance you will emerge from it starving for truly alive art. I sure did.

At least as seen at the Met, Bellows was constantly changing his subject matter and adjusting his often buttery handling of paint, but too many of the canvases fall short of being convincing. His best efforts here are limited mostly to the early years of the 20th century, when, in a burst of promise shortly after arriving in New York, Bellows made paintings of street urchins, boxers, construction sites and urban riverscapes that are found in the exhibition’s first four galleries. Too many works in the remaining six are stilted period pieces.

The Bellows conjured in the Met show comes across as a talented and ambitious yet complacent artist, earnest and hard-working but often remote, an artist who frequently failed to work from that crucial point where criticality and desperation forge ambition and skill into something indelibly personal and expandable. He once said, “A work of art can be any imaginable thing, and this is the beginning of modern painting.” And yet his own art rarely questions the accepted conventions of his time.

But whether this exhibition does Bellows’s achievement justice is a good question, and easier to answer than usual: the catalogue raisonné of Bellows’s paintings is available online. (It was assembled by Glenn C. Peck, who contributes an essay to the catalog.)

Perusing the nearly 700 paintings reproduced on the site reveals that the show ignores all but four of the hundreds of increasingly visionary plein air oil panels of rocky coasts, landscapes and ramshackle farms that Bellows painted from 1911 on, first in Maine and then in Woodstock, N.Y. (A wall text in the final gallery dismissively refers to the small Woodstock landscapes as “bucolic,” an underestimation.) There are also numerous larger works that might have improved the show, among them the National Design Museum’s great Maine canvas, “Three Rollers” (1911).

Bellows may have enjoyed more success than was good for him. Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1882, he was the only child of a comfortably well-off builder; he grew up excelling at sports and art and wanted to be an illustrator. He played baseball and basketball at Ohio State University and was encouraged to pursue art. By 1904 he was in New York, where he played semipro baseball during his first two summers and studied with the charismatic artist Robert Henri, who diverted him from illustration toward painting.

Henri exhorted his students to paint urban life at its grittiest — which would later lead them to be known as the Ashcan School — and to study Manet, Daumier, Velázquez and Goya and other European masters of suggestive darkness. “On the East Side,” a deeply shadowed early drawing that Bellows made around 1906, evinces a touching reverence for Rembrandt, though he would also look to Renoir, Degas and Whistler.

Bellows was exhibiting his work by 1907, receiving prizes and positive reviews. It didn’t hurt that as a former athlete and eventual family man who liked to paint his wife and daughters, he projected a virile persona, nonneurotic and nonbohemian. By 1911 he was represented in the Met’s collection; by 1913 he was a full member of the National Academy of Design, the youngest ever admitted. In the thick of New York’s progressive art circles, he helped install Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” in the Armory Show — in which he was also represented — but he disdained the exhibition’s most radical import, Cubism.

Bellows’s gifts for illustration and handling paint enabled him to follow Henri’s advice with rare verve, as evidenced by paintings like the 1906 “Kids,” whose lush surface and precarious composition captures the incipient chaos of children’s sidewalk games with an immediacy that presages the photographs of Helen Levitt.

In the 1907 “42 Kids,” with its swarm of boys skinny-dipping in the East River, his painterly and caricatural ease collude so effectively that the figures read as cartoons. This hints at a problem that runs throughout his work: his figures often feel more like glosses, types or character actors playing parts than like real people. Exceptions can be found in early portraits like “Paddy Flannigan” (1908), where a cross-eyed, bucktoothed newsboy strikes a defiant, bare-chested pose, fully present.

At times Bellows seemed to think that modernity was achieved by scaling up the oil study until the physicality of paint becomes an especially active part of the story. In his best-known painting, the 1909 “Stag at Sharkey’s,” the colliding bodies of the two fighters are defined by sinuous strokes of paint that make their flesh seem almost to meld at impact. It looks back to the French and Spanish masters, while pointing in its raw violence toward Futurism and even Action Painting. The work personifies an artist who, as Carol Troyen, curator emerita of American paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, writes in the catalog, shrewdly walked the line between tradition and innovation and was seen in his time as an unlikely combination of academician and independent.

More genuinely forward-looking are three dark, enigmatic paintings of the excavation for Penn Station from 1907-9 that, as Ms. Troyen suggests, show modern progress as a violation of nature, a giant void in the earth, and give this “wound” a reality and lasting power that no photograph could match. In these works paint is laid on in broad, rough slabs, becoming earth and also incipient abstraction. Loosely descriptive details intimate machines, bonfires, workers and surrounding buildings, all but dwarfed by the primordial setting. Across the way, “Rain on the River” of 1908, a sweeping view of Riverside Park, busy railroad tracks and the Hudson rendered in misty, Whistlerian grays, has an effortless ease.

In the fourth gallery Bellows’s painting starts to stall. He mustered a few more strong depictions of city life, countering the void of the excavation paintings with the 1911 “New York,” an allover cacophony of people, vehicles and buildings on Madison Square in Manhattan at rush hour, and coming to terms with Impressionism in paintings of the snow-banked Hudson in winter.

But his tactile surfaces and compositions start to feel regimented and sometimes overly full. Summery images of white-clad figures at leisure in Central Park or watching a polo match resemble illustrations for Vanity Fair, as do later paintings of tennis matches at Newport, R.I., to which he adds glowing, El Greco skies. His images of New York dockworkers and later Maine shipbuilders start to be more ennobling and hollow than gritty.

Hereafter the show feels rushed, superficial and slightly disorganized. It pauses briefly for the Maine landscapes, most notably “Shore House” and “An Island in the Sea”; scatters Bellows’s lithographs about incoherently; and gives too much space to a group of histrionic, propagandistic paintings of atrocities that, it was later revealed, the Germans mostly did not commit during World War I.

A final gallery (where Anderson’s quotation appears on the wall) includes four large stiff group portraits, where one — the deeply strange portrait of “Mr. and Mrs. Phillip Wase” — would have sufficed. Depicting a farm couple from Woodstock, where Bellows summered during the last several years of his life, the Wase portrait’s dry, honest realism is justifiably seen as a precursor to American scene painting. On the opposite wall hang three smaller, more freely worked paintings dominated by fantastical landscapes, the most intriguing of which is “The White Horse,” where the El Greco sky seems quite at home among a panoply of feathery plants and trees.

This exhibition, which has been overseen at the Met by H. Barbara Weinberg, curator of American paintings, and Lisa M. Messinger, associate curator of Modern and contemporary art, conveys the complexity of Bellows’s work without sorting its strengths and weaknesses or examining the importance of his landscape paintings — whose bright colors can still be off-putting — during his final decade.

The preface to the catalog states that the show “highlights the ends more than the means of Bellows’s art — its subjects and meanings more than its methods and techniques.” This is an unfortunate approach to take with an artist like Bellows, whose passion for paint was so overt. In his final years it may have brought him closer than anyone yet realizes to the something he was always after.

Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.

NOV 12, 2012 12:22 PM450,301 212

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Exclusive: John McAfee Wanted for Murder (Updated)

Is This the End for London’s Black Cabs?

RELATED

• Historic makers of iconic London black cabs calls in administrators after failing to secure funding from Chinese shareholder The Daily Mail
• London black cab manufacturer goes into administration Here4Business

 Follow @timenewsfeed

The gleaming black cabs that grace the streets of the British capital have become a London icon. From the London Olympics opening ceremonies to Spice Girls music videos, the black cab is a sign of all things British. But the long-standing reign of these vehicles may be coming to an end.

Manganese Bronze, the company that has been making black cabs since 1948, has declared bankruptcy, putting nearly 300 jobs at risk. Talks to secure the funds needed to save the ailing manufacturer have ended in failure. The company, based in Coventry, England, has had a difficult year. In October it was forced to take 400 cabs off the roads after discovering a steering fault. In a statement, Manganese has said that the group will continue to operate during the bankruptcy process and would make a “speedy” resolution of the recall a top priority, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

(MORE: London Falling)

The possible demise of the cabs’ manufacturer marks the end of more than a century of the historic vehicles’ presence on the streets of London. While motorized taxis have plied the streets of London since the beginning of the 20th century, the black cab as we know it was introduced in the late ’50s — a vehicle that featured fully hydraulic brakes and signature “bunny ears” turn indicators. It quickly became famous for its ability to maneuver through the narrow, congested streets of the British capital, with a turning radius of just 25 ft. — a requirement for city vehicles that dates back to 1906, when cars needed to be able to navigate the minute roundabout at the entrance to the Savoy hotel.

The car’s ability to negotiate London’s small avenues has made it a particularly attractive option for celebrities trying to avoid the eye of the paparazzi. Model Kate Moss and actor Stephen Fry reportedly own their own personal black cabs, as does the Queen’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. Arnold Schwarzenegger even ordered a fleet of black taxis to be transported all the way to California.

The iconic London black-cab model, the Austin FX4, entered service in 1958 and is the longest surviving British vehicle after the Land Rover. It was replaced in 1991 by the TX1, a more modern car that reflects the shape of the traditional FX4. But Manganese Bronze no longer has a monopoly on London cabs; with drivers now also allowed to use the Mercedes Vito, a six-passenger minivan, the company has failed to turn a profit since 2007.

(MORE: James Bond at 50)

John Russell, the head of Manganese, has vowed to keep the troubled group’s meter running but warned that it was in a “very uncertain situation,” according to the Daily Mail.Today there are more than 20,000 licensed black cabs serving the streets of London.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/12/is-it-the-end-for-londons-black-cabs/#ixzz2C2Ooeetn

Copyright. 2012. Time.com All Rights Reserved

Is This the End for London’s Black Cabs?

RELATED

• Historic makers of iconic London black cabs calls in administrators after failing to secure funding from Chinese shareholder The Daily Mail
• London black cab manufacturer goes into administration Here4Business

 Follow @timenewsfeed

The gleaming black cabs that grace the streets of the British capital have become a London icon. From the London Olympics opening ceremonies to Spice Girls music videos, the black cab is a sign of all things British. But the long-standing reign of these vehicles may be coming to an end.

Manganese Bronze, the company that has been making black cabs since 1948, has declared bankruptcy, putting nearly 300 jobs at risk. Talks to secure the funds needed to save the ailing manufacturer have ended in failure. The company, based in Coventry, England, has had a difficult year. In October it was forced to take 400 cabs off the roads after discovering a steering fault. In a statement, Manganese has said that the group will continue to operate during the bankruptcy process and would make a “speedy” resolution of the recall a top priority, according to a report in the Daily Mail.

(MORE: London Falling)

The possible demise of the cabs’ manufacturer marks the end of more than a century of the historic vehicles’ presence on the streets of London. While motorized taxis have plied the streets of London since the beginning of the 20th century, the black cab as we know it was introduced in the late ’50s — a vehicle that featured fully hydraulic brakes and signature “bunny ears” turn indicators. It quickly became famous for its ability to maneuver through the narrow, congested streets of the British capital, with a turning radius of just 25 ft. — a requirement for city vehicles that dates back to 1906, when cars needed to be able to navigate the minute roundabout at the entrance to the Savoy hotel.

The car’s ability to negotiate London’s small avenues has made it a particularly attractive option for celebrities trying to avoid the eye of the paparazzi. Model Kate Moss and actor Stephen Fry reportedly own their own personal black cabs, as does the Queen’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. Arnold Schwarzenegger even ordered a fleet of black taxis to be transported all the way to California.

The iconic London black-cab model, the Austin FX4, entered service in 1958 and is the longest surviving British vehicle after the Land Rover. It was replaced in 1991 by the TX1, a more modern car that reflects the shape of the traditional FX4. But Manganese Bronze no longer has a monopoly on London cabs; with drivers now also allowed to use the Mercedes Vito, a six-passenger minivan, the company has failed to turn a profit since 2007.

(MORE: James Bond at 50)

John Russell, the head of Manganese, has vowed to keep the troubled group’s meter running but warned that it was in a “very uncertain situation,” according to the Daily Mail.Today there are more than 20,000 licensed black cabs serving the streets of London.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/12/is-it-the-end-for-londons-black-cabs/#ixzz2C2Ooeetn

Copyright. 2012. Time.com All Rights Reserved

BLOG: RACE START DAY, FROM TEAM DIRECTOR STEWART HOSFORD

What an unbelievable day! The Vendée Globe is a phenomena. This morning I woke at 6am and as I was leaving the apartment at 6.30 I could hear a huge crowd gathering with horns blowing and people chanting. It is like a crowd of people gathering at the coliseum in ancient Rome to see the gladiators parade into the arena with the same excitement and energy, and it feels like to me – a thirst for seeing those about to sacrifice themselves to unknown perils..

The team were due to meet at 07.30 and when I arrived just after the 7am the whole team were already onsite and working – this is it!

We gathered together on the hospitality boat with 100 guests and Alex arrives at 8.00. He takes a good breakfast, a weather briefing to finalise the strategy for the Biscay exit and the Portuguese coast and then a physio session and some time with his sports psychologist. At 9.30 he is ready. He says goodbye to his one year old son Oscar and his wife Kate and that is the hardest part. I walk the docks and I see all the skippers arrive with many of them with red eyes from saying goodbye to their families and children and the atmosphere is charged like nothing I have ever experienced in sailing or sport before. First I say goodbye to our team friend Gutek from Poland who received his boat from us 7 weeks ago and has spent literally a few days sailing in preparation for this most extreme of sailing challenges. He is a tough guy but this morning you could see the emotion on his face – and maybe not an inconsiderable amount of fear.

So as the boats leave the dock we take Alex to the race boat where he does a couple of quick TV interviews and the lines are cast off. The most impressive part of the Vendee Globe is the trip of 1 mile down the canal to the open sea. The quay walls are lined with what must have been 400,000 spectators and they do not simply clap and wave – they roar their heads off and chant in appreciation of the brave skippers. As soon and we rounded the corner and I heard the roar the tears were very close. The crowds hang onto every piece of space and there were people in the water and standing on the top of chimney stacks with a deafening cauldron of sound as we exit the canal.

As we reach the end of the canal we take the journalists and our sponsors off the boat as the sea becomes rough and Alex is left with the technical team to make the final preparations. Ross, Clarkee, Rachel, Guillermo, Will, Capey and I stay to the end to set everything up for him and set him on his way. The sea was very rough out in the Biscay today and with a weather front passing over with lots of cloud and rain the Vendee Globe offered us up a foreboding seascape for the start of this epic race. At 15 minutes to the start the sails are set the boat is positioned and Ross, Capey, Rachel and I jump into the support boat and say our goodbyes. I guess when you work on something like this for 3 years and you imagine all the things you will say to Alex as you say goodbye, at the end these clever words of motivation are not necessary and simply a hug, a “love you man” and “come home safe” are all that are really necessary and meaningful. A few wet eyes and it is done – he is off!

Just before the 4 minutes to the race start when the gun sounds, the last remaining crew Clarkee, Will & Guillermo give him a quick hug, and with no time to get the rib alongside, simply step over the side of the boat into the Ocean. We pull them out of the water and he is alone.

A good start, conservative, middle of the fleet, in clear air and we follow him closely on our support boat as we pass by thousands of other spectator boats with (on my last count) 12 helicopters from various TV networks thundering overhead. We follow the boat far out to sea to make sure he does not get tangled with any other spectator boat and eventually soaking wet and seriously bounced around, I look at Ross and he at me and we know it is time. We wait and follow him for another 10 minutes and then I make the call – time to go. So, we buzz alongside, and we shout out Good luck Alex – and he simply turns and gives us a quick wave before going back to helming and looking ahead. In all the time we followed on the support boat (maybe 2 hours in total) I did not see him look back at us behind him once, he knew we were there, but kept his eyes forward and out to sea. And that is it, you turn for home and leave him sail off and meet his own destiny.

For now, the next stage of the journey starts, we communicate with him through email, video and phone and we support him on his journey. We also, as a team get together and have a huge party and celebrate all the work that we have done to get to this point – but shhhhhh, we don’t tell Alex about our party tonight.

Vendée Globe – most special sporting event on the planet (IMHO).

 

Copyright. 2012  AlexThompsonRacing.com All Rights Reserved

BLOG: RACE START DAY, FROM TEAM DIRECTOR STEWART HOSFORD

What an unbelievable day! The Vendée Globe is a phenomena. This morning I woke at 6am and as I was leaving the apartment at 6.30 I could hear a huge crowd gathering with horns blowing and people chanting. It is like a crowd of people gathering at the coliseum in ancient Rome to see the gladiators parade into the arena with the same excitement and energy, and it feels like to me – a thirst for seeing those about to sacrifice themselves to unknown perils..

The team were due to meet at 07.30 and when I arrived just after the 7am the whole team were already onsite and working – this is it!

We gathered together on the hospitality boat with 100 guests and Alex arrives at 8.00. He takes a good breakfast, a weather briefing to finalise the strategy for the Biscay exit and the Portuguese coast and then a physio session and some time with his sports psychologist. At 9.30 he is ready. He says goodbye to his one year old son Oscar and his wife Kate and that is the hardest part. I walk the docks and I see all the skippers arrive with many of them with red eyes from saying goodbye to their families and children and the atmosphere is charged like nothing I have ever experienced in sailing or sport before. First I say goodbye to our team friend Gutek from Poland who received his boat from us 7 weeks ago and has spent literally a few days sailing in preparation for this most extreme of sailing challenges. He is a tough guy but this morning you could see the emotion on his face – and maybe not an inconsiderable amount of fear.

So as the boats leave the dock we take Alex to the race boat where he does a couple of quick TV interviews and the lines are cast off. The most impressive part of the Vendee Globe is the trip of 1 mile down the canal to the open sea. The quay walls are lined with what must have been 400,000 spectators and they do not simply clap and wave – they roar their heads off and chant in appreciation of the brave skippers. As soon and we rounded the corner and I heard the roar the tears were very close. The crowds hang onto every piece of space and there were people in the water and standing on the top of chimney stacks with a deafening cauldron of sound as we exit the canal.

As we reach the end of the canal we take the journalists and our sponsors off the boat as the sea becomes rough and Alex is left with the technical team to make the final preparations. Ross, Clarkee, Rachel, Guillermo, Will, Capey and I stay to the end to set everything up for him and set him on his way. The sea was very rough out in the Biscay today and with a weather front passing over with lots of cloud and rain the Vendee Globe offered us up a foreboding seascape for the start of this epic race. At 15 minutes to the start the sails are set the boat is positioned and Ross, Capey, Rachel and I jump into the support boat and say our goodbyes. I guess when you work on something like this for 3 years and you imagine all the things you will say to Alex as you say goodbye, at the end these clever words of motivation are not necessary and simply a hug, a “love you man” and “come home safe” are all that are really necessary and meaningful. A few wet eyes and it is done – he is off!

Just before the 4 minutes to the race start when the gun sounds, the last remaining crew Clarkee, Will & Guillermo give him a quick hug, and with no time to get the rib alongside, simply step over the side of the boat into the Ocean. We pull them out of the water and he is alone.

A good start, conservative, middle of the fleet, in clear air and we follow him closely on our support boat as we pass by thousands of other spectator boats with (on my last count) 12 helicopters from various TV networks thundering overhead. We follow the boat far out to sea to make sure he does not get tangled with any other spectator boat and eventually soaking wet and seriously bounced around, I look at Ross and he at me and we know it is time. We wait and follow him for another 10 minutes and then I make the call – time to go. So, we buzz alongside, and we shout out Good luck Alex – and he simply turns and gives us a quick wave before going back to helming and looking ahead. In all the time we followed on the support boat (maybe 2 hours in total) I did not see him look back at us behind him once, he knew we were there, but kept his eyes forward and out to sea. And that is it, you turn for home and leave him sail off and meet his own destiny.

For now, the next stage of the journey starts, we communicate with him through email, video and phone and we support him on his journey. We also, as a team get together and have a huge party and celebrate all the work that we have done to get to this point – but shhhhhh, we don’t tell Alex about our party tonight.

Vendée Globe – most special sporting event on the planet (IMHO).

 

Copyright. 2012  AlexThompsonRacing.com All Rights Reserved