SAM GOODCHILD

FROM A LIVEABOARD CHILDHOOD TO BECOMING BRITAIN'S BEST OCEAN RACING PROSPECT, SAM GOODCHILD TALKS TO HELEN FRETTER ABOUT ACHIEVING A LIFETIME DREAM

- Jean-Marie Liot/Alea

As 2004 drew to a close, a 15-year-old Sam Goodchild was leafing through his dad's copy of Yachting World - the magazine no doubt slightly dog-eared and delayed, by the time the subscription had been delivered to the family's home in Grenada. Inside was the remarkable story of Conrad Humphreys, one of three British skippers in the Vendée Globe, who had to single-handedly repair the rudders on his IMOCA Hellomoto, diving underneath the boat off Cape Town.

Sam felt a jolt of inspiration. “I remember quite vividly reading an article on Hellomoto,” he recalls. “Conrad's was the story that stuck in my mind. And that was where the idea of doing the Vendée formed.”

It was a time of change for the Goodchild family. Six weeks before the Vendée Globe fleet set off in France, Hurricane Ivan had ripped through the island they'd made home. Infrastructure was destroyed, and Sam spent a term going to school in Antigua, some 250 miles away. Not long after, he flew back to the UK, swapping barefoot sailing in the Caribbean for boarding school and dinghy racing on a chilly reservoir. But the Vendée spark kept burning.

Twenty years later, he celebrated his 35th birthday while leading the 2024 Vendée Globe. That teenage dream had been made real in a way he could never have predicted.

LIVEABOARD LIFE

Sam Goodchild was not quite born on a boat, but very nearly. “It was a matter of months,” he says. “My parents decided to go cruising while my mum was pregnant. My dad sailed across the Atlantic just after I was born, then I flew out with my mum. I was two or three months old.”