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© Jean-Louis Carli / Alea

Amedeo and Baden 16th A fluid race for the Franco-German duo

IMOCA
Best of course  |  13 November 2025 - 20h08
Taking 16th place in the IMOCA class, crossing the Martinique finish line at 12:41:10hrs local time (16:41:10hrs UTC) Fabrice Amedeo and Germany’s Andreas Baden finished just two hours and 23 minutes behind Manu Cousin and Jean-Baptiste Daramy (Coup de Pouce). Their elapsed time is 18 days 11 hours. It is the Franco-German duo’s second time racing the Coffee Route course together after finishing 28th from 40 in 2023 in a time of 16 days 21 hours.

“It was much more fluid how we worked this time, we really did kind of take up where we left off last time.” Smiled the 33 year old who is originally from Bonn. 

Speaking of the route his project is taking now, Baden says:  “I have decided to try and do The Ocean Race first ahead of doing the Vendée Globe, I think that is more interesting for German sponsors and we are working really hard to finalise things on the sponsor side and to get the option to buy a boat at the start of next year. But this is all good miles and more experience and I will now also do the delivery back without Fabrice, just with the tech team. But also from the media side it is good to get more visibility. The boat technically is much easier to sail than the modern foilers but this is a perfect opportunity to get more experience and more visibility. We enjoy sailing together. We sailed better than last time and it was a more challenging race,”

 

Mistake? 

He recalls, “ I think on my side we made one mistake when we were heading west we gybed south with Manu together from the high into the trade winds – half way across – then all our routing said go more west and Manu was continuing and so after that we missed the one to one racing and he found a bit more wind than us and was going faster. If we had stayed with him we were a little slower but could sail lower so we could have been closer but in the end a split of two hours whatever it was, it was maybe a mistake.”

 "The time out here on the water is always nice, you see the wildlife, you see the sunsets, if you are on a boat like this with no foils and you are in 15-20kts of wind you have time to profit from the time out there, I enjoyed every moment and like always it is great memories for the winter months. 
And being with Fabrice is good, he does well with sponsors – my weak point – we had a lot of conversations about which boat and how I should develop my programme. I am more into the technical parts, but the management of building a following and a pool of sponsors is Fabrice strong point so we had some good conversations.”