With an Olympic equestrian as their mother and a World Cup-winning rugby player as their father, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the children of Zara and Mike Tindall have inherited their parents’ love of sport and, with it, a healthy determination to win.
And it seems that their eldest two children, Mia, aged nine, and Lena, five, enjoy playing games with their cousins, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, the children of the Prince and Princess of Wales, with Zara admitting that the children can get competitive when playing together.
In an interview with Australian Woman’s Weekly, Zara and Mike, who are also parents to two-year-old son Lucas, revealed that they often hang out with Prince William and Princess Kate’s brood: “Our kids play with their kids in this competition we have,” explained Mike.
The former rugby player added: “Competition done the right way is so healthy, I think. It drives people to get better; for sports people it drives you to train, it drives you to push as hard as you can. You need that.” Equestrian Zara, who won a silver medal at the 2012 London Olympics, echoed this: “I think our families are fairly competitive.”
But it seems their two daughters can get upset when games don’t go in their favour. Mike joked with the publication: “Mia doesn’t like losing at the moment. [And] now Lena is getting old enough to start pushing Mia because there’s a bit of a gap. Then Lucas is going to be even worse because he’s going to be trying to catch them up all the time. It’s definitely in there.”
The former I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! contestant, added: “The biggest learning is to be competitive but not throw your toys out of the pram when you lose. It’s about going away and thinking, ‘Why did I lose?’ That’s where the growth comes from.”
It’s clear that cousins Zara and Prince William have a strong bond that has been expanded to their respective families, too. Zara’s husband even welcomed his mother-in-law, the Princess Royal, Prince William and Princess Kate on his podcast series, The Good, The Bad & The Rugby, back in September, when the family’s close connection was evident through banter and fascinating family anecdotes.
In one hilarious moment, Mike was asked about the Princess of Wales – a self-confessed sport lover and fierce competitor herself – and her rugby skills. “I text Ellis [Genge] and said, ‘Mate, please tell me anything she messed up on’ so I could sort of… family WhatsApp group, get to her, and he said, ‘No she was actually pretty good, and she was really good at kicking,’ and I was like [sighs]. But she has this competitive nature,” Mike said.
Kate, in another moment, shared: “I love all sport, I generally love all sport. I love swimming, personally I love swimming wherever. The colder, the better. When it’s dark and it’s raining, I will go out and seek cold water.”
source: hello magazine. com
