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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Record Collector (Cont.)

UNTIL ABOUT TEN years ago, Fossett, who grew up in Garden Grove, California, was an anonymous plodder on the endurance-sport circuit, a man who trained for five years to complete the Iditarod dogsled race (which he did in 1992) and who required four attempts to swim the English Channel. (He finally succeeded in 1985, in 22 hours and change, earning an award for the slowest time of the year and a hypothermic trip to the hospital.) But in 1990, after making a fortune working as an options trader on the Chicago exchange, Fossett plugged into a new game, dedicating his time and millions to a life of breaking records in ballooning, sailing, flying, and gliding. Since then, Fossett, who has been married to his wife, Peggy, for 35 years and has no children, has been on a nonstop bender, racking up more than 30 world records at a carnivorous pace that keeps him in the air or on the water more than 200 days a year. He was named Rolex Yachtsman of the Year in 2001 and is only the second person to win the Prix de la Vaulx—one of aviation's most coveted awards—four times. Fossett is best known as the first human to solo a balloon around the globe nonstop, a feat he knocked off in July 2002. If there were a world record for setting world records, he would probably hold that, too.

Our first night at sea, I'm lying in one of four bunks in PlayStation's port hull. My feet are oriented toward the bows so I don't risk a broken neck if we hit a whale or a semisubmerged container. We've been divided into three four-man watches. The rotation is four hours on, four hours on standby, and four hours off. I'm due on deck at 0400. Water roars past my head just outside the hull skin. I remember too late that smart multihull sailors pack earplugs.

Fossett wasn't much better prepared when he launched himself into the world of high-speed sailing in the early nineties. Despite a total lack of racing experience, he bought a 60-foot racing trimaran (the fastest, most complex machine a sailor could set foot on at the time) and named it Lakota. He spent much of his first race, a double-hander around Britain and Ireland with Scully in 1993, puking over the side. But a year later he pulled up on Lakota to the start of the brutal Route du Rhum, a single-handed race from France to Guadeloupe. "I thought it was completely silly," Scully says of Fossett's Route du Rhum plans, as PlayStation knifes downwind at 20-plus knots. "This was a guy who knew little about sailing, his situational awareness on a scale of one to ten was about a two, and he was on the most powerful sailboat in the world." With the assistance of a 50-page briefing book hastily prepared by sailing vet Ben Wright, Fossett not only survived; he came in fifth.

He grins the following day as he recalls the experience. "I didn't speak any French, but I understood when the weather briefer kept saying, 'Force neuf, force neuf,' " which meant the fleet was in for hellish storms. I ask if he'd had second thoughts. "Nope," he shrugs. "I just said, 'Oh, jeez.' " The comment is classic Fossett: no emotion, no drama. He blithely sailed off into a maelstrom and delivered a steady performance as France's sailing stars faltered around him. That same year Fossett started plans for PlayStation, whose name is a nod to its sponsor at the time, Sony.

Fossett traces his record-breaking addiction back to his '93 sprint around Ireland with Scully and Thompson, which took just under 45 hours and improved by more than a day a mark that had languished since 1972. "I realized I considered setting a world record more important than winning the annual race," he says as we duck spray in the cockpit. Whatever the challenge, Fossett insists on being directly involved. He says that the America's Cup never interested him, because it requires wagering millions of dollars at long odds, and "there is the problem that I like to be the principal. If I'm sailing, I want to be the skipper."

Ask Fossett to explain his motivation and he is characteristically sphinxlike. Peter Hogg, who sailed across the Pacific with Fossett in 1996, is more bluntly forthcoming. "Steve is looking for acceptance—not in a social sense but through recognition of his sporting accomplishments," he says, taking a break from Tuesdays with Morrie, a single copy of which at least three of us, looking for off-watch diversion, are trying to read. "He wants to be seen as an equal to his competitors in ballooning, sailing, and flying, not just as a rich fucker who can write checks."

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