Livorno «I had already won my regatta and I had won the race that matters most, saving Isabelle. If you’re racing and you’re a couple hundred miles away from another competitor in trouble, you owe it to yourself to help. I’m not a hero.” This is probably one of the most famous and emotional phrases uttered by Giovanni Soldini, navigator, specialized in solitary and crewed ocean navigation. A great sailor, a great man, who arrived in Livorno as part of the 2024 International Sailing Week. He first met the official students of the Naval Academy in the presence of team admiral Antonio Natale, commander of the Navy schools and rear admiral Lorenzano Di Renzo at the summit of S. Jacopo, and then boarded the Fremm class frigate “Carlo Margottini”, in command of the CF Claudia di Paolo, to start the RAN, the Regatta which at 6pm on Wednesday 24 April seen at departure 15 boats on the route to Porto Cervo, Capri and return to Livorno.
But let’s go back to the phrase uttered by Soldini, born in Milan in 1966, a sailor by choice since he was a teenager. The race was the World Around Alone 1998-1999, when the famous French sailor Isabelle Autissier – during the third leg from Auckland (New Zealand) to Punta del Este (Uruguay) – capsized her boat in the South Pacific in an area of sea practically devoid of maritime traffic. Soldini abandoned the route to go in search of her sailor friend. In the end he started searching, after a consultation with the meteorologist Pierre Lasnier, in a twenty by twenty kilometer stretch of sea, managing to save Isabelle. It was February 16, 1999, Autissier had been at the mercy of the waves for twenty-four hours. In 2000 Soldini was awarded the Legion of Honor by decision of the then French president Jacques Chirac. At the Naval Academy, Soldini’s sailing and epic history, spanning over thirty years, was summarized in a three-minute video where the images of the man and the boat challenge the power of the sea. Opening a focus on his “career”, that of a boy who was “lucky to sail far and wide on a sailing boat”, he summarized his “five or six solo trips around the world, the three or four times at Cape Horn, about forty transoceanic ones”.
What does it feel like to sail alone in the middle of the ocean?
«I have done many solo regattas – replies Soldini – but you can’t do a round-the-world trip alone. You win and lose with a group of people who dedicate themselves for months to preparing the ‘challenge’. I have always spoken in the plural, first of all because for me the boat is a living being and consequently lives with me. And then there is the team that works to make the undertaking possible.”
What is your relationship with the boat?
«When you are alone you listen to it and the relationship becomes very special, all-encompassing. A relationship that replicates when the crew is there with whom you share experiences, fears, emotions, enthusiasm, adventures. This is why a very special bond is created.”
In 1999 he managed to save Isabelle Autissier: what were his fears after receiving the message of what had happened?
«At first the feeling was one of terror. I was 200 miles north of where the shipwreck had occurred. The concern was not to see the overturned boat in the quadrant of the sea that I had ‘drawn’. And instead I succeeded by bringing Isabelle to safety.”
She has sailed everywhere and this has allowed her to observe the health of the sea.
«We need care towards the sea. In the last two and a half years we have used a technological control unit (Ocean Pack, ed.) that controls the CO2 on the surface, salinity, water connectivity and temperature. This data is collected for the scientific community to study it. We found many scientists who were super passionate about their work. I also realized a lot of things. The presence of CO2 creates the greenhouse effect and therefore the warming of the sea and the planet. The posidonia meadows and the coral reef are lost, triggering a chain of problems. The earth’s surface and the sea, which occupies about 70% of it, have absorbed so much heat over the years that it is starting to run out of steam. Just look at the signal emitted by the Mediterranean, where in summer the water has long reached temperatures of up to 30 degrees. A signal that is not normal, too many things are going wrong (think of the plastics and microplastics floating in the oceans) and there is a lack of real counteraction to defeat this great enemy. If we are not all able to row in the same direction, it will be difficult to defeat global warming. And this worries me because I have four children to whom I will hand over, if we don’t do something, a world worse than the one I knew.”
Environment and technology: with Maserati you have experimented and created projects that focus on sustainability.
«From 2022, on the Maserati Multi 70 racing trimaran, there will be full electric. We decided to ditch the internal combustion engine and put in an electric one and installed a solar panel system. It was an experiment that enriched me a lot, to autonomously produce the energy necessary to light, make the water drinkable, make the computers work, move the propeller.”
What lessons do you draw from sailing?
«For me sailing is a school of life and I haven’t finished learning yet. The boat is a small world where the world is inside.”
What was the best experience you had in thirty years of sailing?
«It’s a difficult question, I’m of a certain age (smiles, ed.). I have had many experiences: world tours, the Ostar, the record regatta between New York and San Francisco.”
In this regard it must be said that in February 2013 Soldini, on what is called the Gold Route (over 13 thousand miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific passing through Cape Horn), established the new world record with a crew of eight men with Maserati VOR 70 in 47 days, zero hours, 42 minutes and 29 seconds..
She sails on very technological boats. Do you miss the small boats on which you learned to sail many years ago?
«I continue to go on boats from the Seventies, but it is also right that a person lives his time. I did the first transoceanic journey using the sextant, today there is technology which offers other levels of performance. You can not go back. And when I go to sea I still try to use the wind in the best possible way”.
