Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
It’s really not like me to want anything that a professional athlete has (apart from the muscle tone and impressive dedication to physical excellence, that is), but I have to admit that I’m extremely charmed by the love story unfolding in front of us, between two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard and his wife, Trine Hansen. (A retired rower herself, Hansen currently works as a talent manager.)
Outside of this couple’s obvious photogenic adorable-ness (just look at them with their baby!), I love the fact that Hansen has spoken out about just how grueling her husband’s training regimen is, telling a Danish newspaper this month that all of Vingegaard’s travel was “squeezing the lemon too much.”
“It starts in February and it’s back and forth every other week… It’s a really tough life,” she said. “Jonas doesn’t recharge when he’s on another three-week altitude training camp with the team. He really needs to be with us at home in Denmark to do that.”
Apparently, Hansen’s comments have unleashed a firestorm of controversy within the cycling world, to which I can only say…why? Vingegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike team has insisted there’s no issue with the athlete’s schedule, but if you’re going to win not one, but two Tours, I assume your hours do, indeed, have to be pretty insane, not to mention all the travel and the physical exertion. Is it really so wrong for Hansen to say something about it? We love a queen who stands up for her man, even if it makes her unpopular!
Obviously, nobody is forcing Vingegaard to compete in the Tour de France, but given the discourse around star-athlete burnout that we’ve weathered in recent years (see: Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka), it doesn’t seem so unreasonable for someone who loves him to point out that the expectations he’s being held to don’t leave him enough time to…well, have a life with his family. The Vingegaard-Hansens are parents to two children, after all—a four-year-old girl named Frida and a one-year-old son whose name they have yet to publicly reveal—and personally, if I were at home trying to bring up two kids while my husband biked around (not pejorative! I love cycling!), I would also have some choice words for the team that kept him constantly on the move.
As if there weren’t enough already to love about this couple, I just found out that Vingegaard dropped his last name of Rasmussen when he married his wife and instead took hers. More of this, please! From male pro athletes, in particular! I want to buy you all some bell hooks books (All About Love is a good place to start, if any male pro athletes are indeed reading this) and drone on to you about feminism until you’re nearing the Vingegaard level of wife guy!
