Tindall, who is married to Prince William’s cousin Zara Tindall, reminds the world that the Waleses “love sport.”
Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge takes part in a lineout drill during an England rugby training session at Twickenham Stadium on February 2, 2022 in London, England. Photo: Getty
Kate Middleton is well-known for her love of sports, and Britain’s royal family even boasts Olympic equestrians in Princess Anne and Zara Tindall. It’s Zara’s husband, however, who we can thank for facilitating particularly rollicking royal jock talk. Former professional rugby player Mike Tindall is a co-host of the The Good, the Bad, and the Rugby podcast, and is responsible for the revelation that Kate and husband Prince William have never finished a tennis match against one another, and that Kate is a fierce beer pong competitor. In a new interview, he dished further on the exercise that Kate “loves” and the football team her eldest son Prince George will drop everything to watch.
Tindall and his co-hosts, James Haskell and Alex Payne, have co-written an upcoming book, The Good, the Bad, and the Rugby: Unleashed, and spoke with the UK’s Telegraph about it in an interview published Saturday. The podcast made headlines when they recorded an episode with Tindall’s mother-in-law, Princess Anne, and hosted the Prince and Princess of Wales as their guests in September 2023. It was then that Kate’s love of cold plunge swimming was revealed—”the colder, the better”—as well as what William thinks of it: “To the point where William says, ‘Catherine, you’re crazy,’” she said.
Discussing that episode and his close bond with the Waleses (both families have three kids and sporty proclivities, after all, not to mention the whole shared experience of living within the bounds of the royal family), Tindall told the Telegraph, “George loves his football. I’ve played numerous times in the garden with him. He’s passionate about Aston Villa, too. Wherever he is, he’ll sit down and watch that game. They’re just a family who love sport. Catherine loves her running.”
William is also a longtime fan of Aston Villa, and has taken in the team’s games in person with his eldest son as well. Tindall, too, has something of a fun uncle persona, as demonstrated by reports of his dancing his heart out at coronation festivities for King Charles III, ribbing his wife over her age, and calling Prince William a lightweight through an admittedly funny nickname and later apologizing for it.
The senior royals’s guest stint on the podcast came about simply because Tindall asked Princess Anne if William and Kate might be game, building off of their usual conversations and camaraderie and simply sharing that with the public.
“It just came from seeing them in their most relaxed environment,” Tindall explained of the candid chat in the episode. “These are the conversations we have when we’re just talking to each other anyway. With Princess Anne, it’s the conversation we have about rugby at Gloucester, or about Scotland after every Six Nations game. A lot of the time, it will be about a player. She’ll say to me, ‘Should he not be doing this more?’ And I’ll think, ‘You’re actually not that far off.’ We were asking the same questions I had asked them before, but this time they were giving the answers to the public, rather than just to me.”
In the book, he wrote that he has a nice relationship with his royal in-laws. He and fellow athlete Zara Tindall, an Olympic equestrian like her mother, made their relationship public in 2004 before marrying in 2011. They share three children.
“Believe it or not, marrying into the Royal family was pretty easy for me,” he wrote, according to the Telegraph. “They were always nice to me, and I was always nice to them. Simple really.”
Originally published in Vanityfair.com
