Olivier de Kersauson
French yacht racer
Olivier de Kersauson de Pennendreff (born 20 July 1944) is a French sailor and sailing champion.
Kersauson was the seventh child in a family of eight. While he was the only Kersauson not to have been born in Brittany, he was born on 20 July 1944 and brought up near Morlaix in a “provincial Catholic aristocracy with compulsory mass” as he calls it. Very early on, Olivier de Kersauson was to break away from his family. Without being inattentive, he was a pupil who did not settle in well to school life with the priests at boarding school. He passed through eleven schools altogether. After his final school exams and getting up to a lot of things, always on the coast, he began studying economics.
At the age of twenty-two, he met Eric Tabarly in Saint Malo. Shortly after, Eric invited him to do his military service on board. This opportunity stretched into eight years during which he was Tabarly’s mate.
“Olivier de Kersauson” enters the record as french yacht racer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Olivier, Kersauson and French can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q535203. VIAF identifies the subject as 73855495. The Library of Congress control number is n85189992. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Olivier de Kersauson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.