The Royal Family is famously outdoorsy, with everyone from Princess Kate to Prince Harry enjoying activities like archery, hiking, scuba diving and sailing. But one cold-weather sport a royal simply can’t resist is a day out on the slopes—unless you’re King Charles these days, it seems.
During a visit to Middlesbrough, England on Thursday, Feb. 13, the monarch—a longtime enthusiast of the sport—admitted that he had to hang up his skis while speaking to a Swiss native at an offshore wind turbine base factory.
According to the Telegraph, Charles, 76, "told Avzi Jusufi, a machinery expert from Basel: 'I think my skiing days are behind me.'"
Per the publication, the monarch hasn’t been skiing in some time after backing out of his annual ski holiday to Klosers, Switzerland in 2023. A source told the outlet "it would have been 'disastrous' to suffer an accident" ahead of The King’s May coronation that year. However, Charles wasn’t able to reschedule his jaunt to Klosers in 2024, as he was diagnosed with cancer last winter.
Over the years, King Charles took part in countless ski trips, with Princess Diana and sons Prince Harry and Prince William joining in for some, as well Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson. The King used ski holidays to show off his playful side, even pranking the waiting press by stepping out in a ridiculous fake mustache and joke shop nose in 1980.
While Charles had been skiing since he was a teenager, so had Diana, and the sport “was very important to” the late Princess of Wales, according to her former butler Paul Burrell.
Burrell—speaking on behalf of Prime Casino—tells Marie Claire that some of the “happiest times were skiing with the boys, when they went as a family, because Diana still had hopes that she could hold the family together.” Queen Camilla, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be a fan of the sport, with her son Tom Parker Bowles recently telling the Sunday Times that his royal mom “hated skiing.”
The food critic continued that Camilla would “send us up the mountain with a guide while she sat and read her book” and then “come up in the ski lift to meet us for lunch.” Sounds like my kind of girl, TBH.
