For a week, Alexia Barrier has been striving to overcome severe back pain following a violent fall inside her boat that occurred at the beginning of last week.
Alexia puts on a brave face, but there’s no need to read her mind to understand that life on board has become a real ordeal, one that should conclude on Saturday or Sunday. For six days, Alexia has been trying with the race doctor to diagnose the ailment that’s plaguing her. “I fell on my lumbar region. The muscular part is damaged, that’s certain. I don’t know if I’ve broken the transverse process, it’s the little rod that holds the ribs at the lower back. We don’t know if it’s a fracture or not. We can’t do a scan at sea yet! I know my kidneys are fine, I was able to do a urine test which showed I didn’t have blood in my urine. I’m taking codeine paracetamol. I don’t want the pain to worsen because that would mean taking morphine and at that point, you lose a bit of control. I’m not depressed or anything. I’ll soon complete my Vendée Globe and that’s all that matters.”
Arriving quickly remains the only obsession for the woman from the Maralpine region, who optimizes each of her movements and efforts to conserve energy: “I will gybe tomorrow. Currently, I have two reefs and the J3, I could have one reef and the J2 but it doesn’t matter. The wind will pick up, I will take a third reef for the gybe, I will furl the forward sail to avoid straining. I had good training in gybing under challenging conditions in the South. It should calm down only in the last 24 hours before reaching Les Sables d’Olonne. In this respect, I’m luckier than Ari!”
Luck is indeed needed to complete such an adventure, especially since the winds in the Bay of Biscay make progress more difficult in an area where maritime traffic is very dense. The end of the race looks tricky.
