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It’s hard to be sure when things started to change, but I am pretty sure it was the evening of April 20, 1993. As the sun set, spluttering and sizzling into the Atlantic, the 86ft catamaran Commodore Explorer crossed an imaginary finish line near Île d’Ouessant off the northwest corner of France to complete a nonstop lap of the planet. The elapsed time was only a few hours short of 80 days, a new record. Commodore Explorer was the first sailboat to have ever circumnavigated in what was then considered by many to be an unattainable time. The crew was awarded the Jules Verne Trophy for having done so. More importantly, by accomplishing something many thought impossible, skipper Bruno Peyron also started a nautical arms race by proving a big multihull could not only safely sail around the world, but smash pretty much any and all sailing speed records in existence.

Fast forward to the world of massive high-speed multihulls in record circumnavigation was akin to Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile. It was common wisdom at the time that running a mile in under four minutes was humanly impossible. Then Bannister proved it could be done, and almost immediately a slew of other runners did it as well. A psychological barrier had been broken, and the world (of running, at least) was never the same. Same thing with . Once that barrier, a made-up number taken from Jules Vernes’ novel , was broken, the floodgates seemed to open. Scarcely a year later, Peyron’s record was smashed by Kiwi sailing legend Sir Peter Blake and Sir Robin Knox Johnston aboard the trimaran , who knocked a full five days off the record.