In the summer of 2024, Irish offshore solo skipper Tom Dolan became the first non-French sailor to win the Solitaire du Figaro – widely regarded as the proving ground for aspiring IMOCA around-the-world skippers.
Earlier this year, I caught up with Dolan for an episode of the Yacht Racing Podcast, where he described the arc of his career as a professional sailor – from his introduction to sailing with his father aboard a tiny ramshackle dinghy on a lake near the family farm, to moving to France and becoming a major name on the French offshore sailing scene.
During our interview, Tom talked about his first experience in the Figaro 3 class – a one-design, foil-equipped production monohull whose characteristics, he said, were similar to the Mini 6.50 class in which he had cut his teeth in offshore racing.
“It is just like a big Mini, really,” he explained. “Asymmetric spinnakers with more or less the same overall sail setup. And then there were the foils. Everyone was trying to figure out how the foils would work – would they do anything to help performance, or would we have to take them off?
“But we pretty quickly realised that it was a really fun boat and very interesting from a strategic point of view – because of the bigger sailing angles, especially downwind. It was much more sensitive to wind speed differences than its predecessor, the symmetrical Figaro 2.
