The German skipper Boris Herrmann, who finished in fifth place in the Vendée Globe on Seaexplorer-Yacht Club de Monaco, is the new IMOCA Globe Series champion, after a remarkably consistent campaign by his Team Malizia over the last three years.

The championship is calculated by accumulating the scores of skippers and their teams in the major IMOCA Class races, among them the Vendée Globe, the Route du Rhum, the Transat Jacques Vabre, the Bermudes 1000 and the Vendée Arctique.

Herrmann, aged 39 from Hamburg but now based in Lorient, entered all of those races and completed every one. He came out at the head of the championship with Vendée Globe winner Yannick Bestaven (Maitre-CoQ IV) second, and Vendée Globe runner-up and line honours winner Charlie Dalin (APIVIA) third.

The German skipper, who is among the very best ambassadors for the IMOCA Class, said the plan for his team going back to 2018 was to aim for the Vendée Globe and to try to put together a competitive entry. That meant doing all the races leading up to the round-the-world race and he said he is delighted to emerge at the end of it as the new champion.

“In order to prepare well, to be safe and to create value for our sponsors and to develop the project, we wanted to sail in all of the IMOCA programme and do as much as possible and we did,” said Herrmann.

“And we finished all the races and we never abandoned a race, which is great. There is a little bit of luck involved, of course,” added the skipper whose Vendée Globe almost came to an abrupt end just 90 miles from the finish when he hit a Spanish fishing boat. “But not abandoning is really important for me and is more important than the result in any specific race.”