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Alberto and Charlène of Monaco, sixteen years ago the first outing as a couple

Today the eyes are on the blue medals in Beijing, but 16 years ago the Winter Olympic Games were held in Turin. And here, the champion who most of all immediately drew attention to herself was not in the race, but in the stands: she was the South African swimmer Charlène Wittstock (in the pool with her women’s national team in Sydney 2000 and triple gold at the 2002 World Cup) sitting next to the prince Albert of Monaco.

They laughed, held hands, exchanged complicit glances, until she put them down your head on your shoulder: it was the officialization of their love.

Alain BENAINOUS / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Charlène and Alberto had met a Sydney6 years before that public release, but the first official invitation, she will report a few years later to the Sunday Times, it will arrive only a year later. “I have to ask my coach,” says Charlene replied, but in the end, despite the “embarrassed silence” of her coach, she accepted the invitation.

The relationship went on at a distance and without clamor for five years: she in South Africa where she continued to train until a shoulder problem forced her to abandon the competition, he in Monaco, who was back and forth from Durban.

On June 23, 2010, the announcement of the official engagementa year after the wedding in July, preceded by ben three escape attempts by Charlène (always officially denied by Palais Princier): before in Pariswhere he asked for a reception at the South African embassy, ​​then during the Formula 1 Grand Prix of Monte Carlo, and finally the week before the weddingwhen it was literally caught again at the Munich heliport, e even deprived of his passport.

The photos of her tears on her wedding day went around the world and were only on trailer ten years of an unfinished fairy tale exactly according to the canons. Up to Health problems of the last few months: a real one Way of the cross that keeps her away from the Rocca and from her children Jacques And Gabriellaborn in 2014, for almost a year now, except for a fleeting appearance in Munich in November, before recovery in a rehabilitation clinic in Switzerland.

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In the meantime, yes rumors chase on the possible at your place where Charlène could return to public. While the press releases – now mimeographed – arriving from the Palazzo repeat that «the convalescence of the Princess proceeds in such a way satisfying and encouragingThere are those who like Brittani Bargereditor of Royal Centralspeculates with theExpress that Cherlène “will not return home before the National Day”, that is, in November 2022.


Source: Vanity Fair

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