Gothenburg (Sweden) – “It has been an adventure, a real adventure around the world. And we finished successfully”. With this sentence, Torben Grael, the biggest Brazilian Olympic athlete, summed up the Brazilian participation in the Volvo Ocean Race, this Saturday in Gothenburg, Sweden. A pioneer project in Brazil, the Brasil 1 finished the 2005-2006 Volvo Ocean Race in third place, winning 67 points in nine legs, seven in-port races and eight months of sailing to 12 different cities around the world, covering a total of 57 thousand kilometers.

The fleet was welcomed in Sweden by a huge crowd that gathered on the shores of the Gota river which runs through Gothenburg. According to the race organizers, over nine thousand boats were out at sea and on the Gota river canal at the finish of the last leg, an absolute record in this edition.

“It is a dream come true. I leave here with a sense of accomplishment, having reached all the goals we had set for ourselves. The Brasil 1 project will certainly be a landmark in our sport. Having taken part in a project this big with a Brazilian crew going around the world and arriving with such an excellent final result shows how well we did,” confirms the skipper.

In the final leg, 500 miles (925 km) between Holland and Sweden, Brasil 1 took third place, behind the US-Pirates of the Caribbean and the Dutch ABN Amro 2. It was the eight podium finish for the team in this competition and the fourth in a row. The Brazilians still had a chance to finish the race in second place overall but for this they needed to finish four places ahead of the Americans. “The Pirates overtook us when we rounded the corner of Denmark. This time, the wind wasn\'t in our favor,” regrets also two-time Olympic champion Marcelo Ferreira.

“Before we got to the Danish coast the boats split up and that\'s when we lost our chance to take second place overall. Last night we were very close to Pirates, only 100 meters or so, but they got a good breeze and managed to catch up to ABN 2 and overtook them, very frustrating. We could have hung on to Pirates and maybe caught up with ABN 2 but the conditions were very difficult, very little wind and a lot of fog. It was impossible to sail tactically,” said navigator Marcel van Triest, who completed his fifth round-the-world race.

Horacio Carabelli, one of the people who invested the most time in the project, building the boat, coordinating the maintenance crew and also sailing most of the legs, was one of the most relieved people to finish the race. “Now I will have 2 weeks off to rest. I think this will be the most time off I have had in the last two years,\" he jokes. “I need some time with my family before we start all over again. I hadn\'t planned on being a part of the sailing crew but it was worth it and I would do it all over again. You learn a lot with this and the boat demands a lot. I think that the next generation will be a bit more relaxed,” he adds.

Finishing his second consecutive Volvo Ocean Race on the podium, New Zealander Stuart Wilson stated that the decisive moment in the race happened in Baltimore. “When we finished in second place in Baltimore everything changed. It was a change in attitude. We have had a series of problems in the second leg and then we had that horrible leg to Brazil and the disastrous in-port race. When we arrived in the USA moral was way down. Our achievement in Baltimore really motivated us and things started to happen. From then on, we have never missed out on a podium position.”

After eight months, the sailors leave the Brasil 1 with many good memories. “Every round-the-world race is different. In this one the boats were much faster than the previous one. For me, particularly, it was quite different working with Brazilians,” said Marcel van Triest. “Sailing into New York and then winning on my home port, in Rotterdam was also interesting,\" says Marcel. Torben adds: “The best moments of the trip, certainly were sailing around Cape Horn and our win in Rotterdam\".

This Sunday, the Brasil 1 team will continue to celebrate their achievement when the awards ceremony of the ninth leg and the overall race take place, with the Brasil 1 finishing in third place in both events.

The overall Volvo Ocean Race results are as follows: 1.- ABN Amro 1 (HOL), 96 points; 2.- Pirates of the Caribbean (USA), 73; 3.- Brasil 1, 67; 4.- ABN Amro 2; 58.5 points, 5.- Ericsson (SWE) 55; 6.- Movistar, 48; 7.- Brunel, 15.5.

The Brasil 1 is sponsored by VIVO, Motorola, QUALCOMM, HSBC, Embraer, ThyssenKrupp, NIVEA Sun, Ágora Senior Corretora de Valores and the Brazilian Government through Apex (Trade and Investment Promotion Agency), the Ministry of Industry, Development and Foreign Trade, the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Sports, with special support from Varig.