From a liveaboard childhood to becoming Britain’s best ocean racing prospect, Sam Goodchild talks to Helen Fretter about achieving a lifetime dream
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.
School runs by Optimist and a life afloat for Sam and his siblings. Photo courtesy of Sam Goodchild
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.”
The family spent six years living aboard a 38ft wooden double-ender, cruising around the Caribbean. “It was a fairly slow life, mostly living on anchor. My brother turned up when I was three. There was a bit of homeschooling, and on a few of the islands, like Grenada and Tortola, we went to a real school.
“Now, having my own kids, you appreciate how daring and just how out-there it was to do that in the early ’90s. To jump on a boat and say, ‘we’ll figure things out as we go’ with two small kids and a third one coming.”
Goodchild’s father picked up some work doing carpentry as well as teaching. “My dad liked building things, and he built me a little dinghy, a plywood and epoxy Optimist, called Sea Urchin. When I was five or six, that was my happy place,” he recalls.
Any short-handed ocean racer has to be a jack-of-all-trades, able to make repairs on the fly. Goodchild grew up around boat work. “A lot of that came from my dad. I remember we used to call the engine room the angry room, because every time dad went in, he’d come back out angry! From building things with wood and tinkering, whether with engines or electronics or anything else, the fact that it interested me definitely came from my dad.”
“When you think about the Vendée Globe, you always remember the good stuff. I’ve done three now, and you remember…
The family returned to the UK for a couple of years, but the draw of life afloat was strong, and they moved back to the Caribbean. “My dad bought a boat damaged in the hurricanes of 1998, we rebuilt the broken bits, and lived on that boat for another three or four years,” Goodchild recalls. The family settled in Grenada until he was 15.
With GCSEs looming, Goodchild went to a state boarding school in the rural Cotswolds – miles from the sea. Determined to find some sailing, he cycled to Farmoor reservoir, an hour’s pedal away. “I turned up on a Sunday, said, ‘I haven’t got a boat, I haven’t got a wetsuit, but I want to go sailing, what can I do?’”
Teenage Sam was soon in demand among the club dinghy fleet, and began racing 29ers. “Fairly quickly I also went match racing, because at 15, I was completely out of my depth with anyone that had done Optimist racing for 10 years, but a lot more at ease on a First Class 8 or a J/80.”
Sam Goodchild was the first graduate of the Artemis Offshore Academy aged 21, racing a Figaro. Photo: Lloyd Images
Life plan
He was selected for what later became the British Keelboat Academy when Alex Thomson’s team offered the opportunity for a couple of academy sailors to help deliver a Volvo 60. With his big boat experience, Sam was signed up. “I took my Easter holidays to sail across the Atlantic from Portsmouth to Canada,” he recalls.
“That opened my world up to meeting people that earned a living doing what my passion was. I thought, ‘I don’t need to go to school anymore, I know exactly what I’m going to do.’” His parents persuaded him to at least finish his A-levels, and a week after sitting his final exam, Sam was back working for Thomson.
He next moved to Mike Golding’s team, preparing Golding’s IMOCA for the 2008 Vendée Globe. “I was just a nipper, doing everything that no one else wanted to do. They once gave me glue to stick on a padeye and I did it so badly, I didn’t get given glue again!”
Sam’s 2013 Solitaire du Figaro was the best British result for 20 years. Photo: Maxime Flipo/Solitaire du Figaro
The 2008 Vendée was the biggest yet, with seven British entries. It was Goodchild’s first taste of the iconic event he’d read about four years previously. “I went down the channel on start day and no one had briefed me as to what it was going to be like. It was just complete mayhem. But to actually see it only increased my hunger to come back in my own way somewhere down the line.”
Making an impression
Creating his own opportunities, Goodchild pulled together a shoestring campaign for a double-handed Round Britain and Ireland. By the time the Artemis Offshore Academy programme was launched, with the aim of developing young British ocean racing talent, Goodchild had done a circumnavigation of Britain, a transat and transpac delivery, and years of living aboard.
“What stood out to us when selecting Sam as the first ‘graduate’ of the Artemis Offshore Academy was his contentment in being onboard a boat,” recalls Academy manager Charles Derbyshire. “It was his home, he could live onboard easily – this freed up so much capacity to plan ahead any manoeuvres or the race strategy. The rhythm of eating and sleeping, sunset and sunrise routines, was innate.
Years in fast multihulls, such as the Ocean 50, developed confidence offshore at speed. Photo: Getty Images
“He also took on board really early on that this was a long road: he wasn’t interested in finding a short cut knowing they are unlikely to exist, so exhibited that other required solo sailing trait: patience.”
Goodchild raced a Figaro for four seasons. In 2013 he was accepted by the Pôle Finistère training centre, and finished 11th overall in the Solitaire du Figaro, the best British result in over 20 years in the multi-stage solo race. Looking back on his Figaro career now, he is circumspect. “I was quite young and out of my depth. The hopes were higher than the results!”
Nevertheless, he had begun to make an impression. “I remember getting a phone call saying, ‘Hey, Sam, it’s Michel Desjoyeaux. I’m going to go do the Volvo Ocean Race, come with me’,” Sam recalls. His first reaction was, ‘I don’t believe you.’
The caller was indeed the legendary ‘Professeur’, and Goodchild joined Mapfre for the start of the 2014 round the world race. But the team imploded by Cape Town and Goodchild was let go. “I got back to France, having been fired by Mapfre, with no Figaro campaign, no money, no boat,” recalls Sam.
Next to call was Brian Thompson, offering racing on a MOD70 in the Caribbean. Goodchild was initially unsure: the options in front of him didn’t seem to lead towards his ultimate goal. “I said to Mich, ‘I want to do the Vendée Globe singlehanded, why should I sail a multihull fully crewed? Is it actually going to help me?’ He told me to go for it because 1), you’ll learn loads sailing with other people, and 2), when you come back to sail monohulls, you won’t be scared of going 30 knots anymore!”
On Holcim-PRB in The Ocean Race. Photo: Georgia Schofield | polaRYSE / Holcim – PRB
Unsurprisingly, Mich Desj was right. Goodchild crewed everything from the MOD70 Phaedo, to Jules Verne bids on Spindrift and Sodebo, sharing watches with some of the world’s best ocean racers. “Definitely something I enjoy about offshore sailing is that it’s constantly learning. I don’t think I’d be at ease in an Olympic campaign where you’re trying to perfect the same movement hundreds of times a day for four years. But I like to keep learning, to keep changing boats and sailing with different people.”
Desjoyeaux’s theory that multihull racing makes everything else seem a bit tame also proved true. “He was 100% right. In 2022 I’d been sailing for two years on the Ocean 50 (formerly Multi 50), which is arguably one of the most dangerous and sketchy boats to sail offshore. Ultims nowadays don’t really lean over – they fly flat. An Ocean 50 is a bit more old-school, you have to lean them over and they can pitchpole because they haven’t got T-rudders. You’re basically on edge the whole time.
“I went from that to a training session with the IMOCA Holcim PRB in 25-30 knots. We got hit by a gust and the deck spreader went in the water, the boat was at 35 degrees. I was thinking, this is all fine, no stress!”
His first TJV on the Class 40 Concise in 2013 ended when the boat began delaminating, but he took 2nd in 2019 with Class 40 Leyton. Photo: Lloyd Images
Dream realised
After years of grafting, his Vendée dream ultimately came together in a hurry. Having delivered some good results skippering the 50ft trimaran Leyton, he joined Thomas Ruyant’s team as part of a two-boat campaign. Sam took over Ruyant’s fast previous generation IMOCA, and by 2023 was lining up for his first Vendée Globe with Vulnerable. “You’re waiting for this big moment, and the moment takes years,” recalls Sam.
Once at the helm of his own IMOCA, he immediately made a big impression. “The 2023 season was what put the most pressure on because we hit the ground running and finished 3rd in every race of the season. I’d been given a great boat with a great team, but off the bat we outperformed expectations: our own and everyone else’s.”
But Goodchild could draw on his wide experience to give him confidence. “By going through all the steps I had to get there, I wasn’t going into the unknown. I’d been in the Southern Ocean with Holcim. I’d been sailing with Brian, he’d done the Vendée. I’d been sailing with Mich, he’d won the Vendée Globe twice. And little by little, it builds confidence. I could understand what they were doing, how they were doing it. I could be reassured that, ok, I might not have made exactly the same decisions or done it perfectly – but I’m not a million miles away.
Powered up on IMOCA Vulnerable ahead of the 2024 Vendée Globe. Photo: Pierre Bouras
“What worried me the most was the mental side of things,” he says. It was something he worked on with a sports psychologist before the Vendée Globe. “There were going to be points where my boat was fast, sometimes even faster than the new boats. And there were points when I knew I was going to be knots slower.
“When you’ll see that you’re losing 10, 20 miles on a position report, it was about making sure that I didn’t get into either a negative spiral of not enjoying it, or a dangerous spiral of taking too many risks and potentially breaking the boat just because I was trying to keep up with people you shouldn’t be able to keep up with.”
The deliberate approach paid off, Sam sailing strong and evenly, never getting too high or too low. When he spent his 35th birthday leading his first Vendée Globe, he sanguinely observed, “It’s going to be hard to beat that. But there’s a long, long way to go, I can’t cover 40 boats.”
Major sail repairs in his final miles. Photo: Sam Goodchild/VG2024
Similarly, when his mainsail exploded during a crash gybe while lying in 4th in his final week, he wasted no energy on disappointment, but threw himself into 48 hours of repairs to get the boat home. “You’re very much into: ‘What’s the action I can do to make the situation better now?’ as opposed to thinking back on what’s slipped through your fingers.” He ultimately finished 9th.
Sam set out with the ambitions of finishing his first Vendée, and enjoying it. He achieved both. Now, as the IMOCA world becomes a merry-go-round of sponsor negotiations, boat sales and build slots, he is trying for a second, even more competitive entry.
“The aim is to have a winning campaign,” he says. “We’re four years out from the start now. So the aim is to give myself the best chance to have a campaign that’s capable of winning it.
“For me, that is a very different campaign in terms of timing, in terms of money, mental preparation, risk management, in terms of everything. Especially when you look at how the last race was won: the level has been upped and the intensity has been upped. But that’s the aim. What’s the saying? Shoot for the moon and hope you land on the stars!”
If you enjoyed this….
Yachting World is the world’s leading magazine for bluewater cruisers and offshore sailors. Every month we have inspirational adventures and practical features to help you realise your sailing dreams.
Build your knowledge with a subscription delivered to your door. See our latest offers and save at least 30% off the cover price.
ABL1 Mins read
Leave a comment