Princess Diana’s Trainer Reveals Her Deepest, Hidden Struggles

For six years, the fitness coach Jenni Rivett was more than just a coach for Princess Diana; She was her confidant of trust.

From emotional revelations to royal routines, Rivett opens onto the vulnerable, dynamic and private side of the Princess of Wales, offering a rare overview of the woman behind the crown.

It was at the end of August 1997 when Princess Diana presented her coach, Jenni Rivett, a card marked by her September training program.

She was about to go to Saint-Tropez for holidays with Dodi al-Fayed. Diana smiled. She was impatiently awaiting the sun, the break, and perhaps the love that flowers.

But Rivett remembers something else.

“She was delighted to escape, she needed a break and she liked to be in the sun, but there were a lot with her,” Jenni told the Daily mail. “A lot of sadness too. Although she has always been fun, had a great sense of humor, I have always had this feeling of sadness underlying about it.”

Diana would never come back from this trip. Her death in a car accident a few days later shocked the world and broke those who knew her best.

Rivett, on vacation in Türkiye at the time, received the news in the early hours. “It was not only the loss of a client. It was the loss of someone who worried me deeply,” she shared.

While his marriage to Prince Charles collapsed, Diana’s emotional world too.

Between 1991 and 1997, widely known as “The War of the Winds”, the Princess found refuge in her training sessions. With Rivett, she could be herself.

“Sometimes Diana told me things so personal that I asked her:” Please don’t say because if it is in the newspapers tomorrow, you will think it was me. “”

Although Diana is the most photographed woman on the planet, Rivett remembers someone who wanted intimacy and authenticity.

The fitness coach said, “She didn’t want this life. She didn’t want anything. All she always wanted was to be a good wife and mother.”

Rivett also said that Diana would have had a broken heart of the current flaw between Prince William and Prince Harry. She noted: “Diana loved her boys; they were everything for her. She would have been devastated by what is happening between them today.”

When Diana met Rivett at the Harbor Club in Chelsea for the first time, she rebounded in the room and joked: “Now, what can you do with this body?”

This opening has defined their relationship.

Diana trained three times a week, loved the aerobic “step” and strongly focused on posture and basic strength. “With Diana, it was technique. She liked to do things well,” said Rivett.

She was also practical, often identifying gymnasiums doing poor exercises and asking Rivett to correct them. When they weren’t inside, Diana loved rollerblading in Kensington gardens, wearing a baseball cap in a mainly futile attempt to avoid paparazzi.

In fact, it was Diana’s idea of ​​carrying the same sweatshirt, a blue virgin Atlantic, so that photographers do not earn money on new images.

This sweatshirt, offered later to Rivett, sold at auction for more than £ 40,000. Rivett donated money to help the son of his gardener to go to school. She revealed: “I wanted it to mean something. Diana would have liked it.”

Rivett remembers Diana as warm and stimulating.

When she got pregnant in 1993, Diana gave her a cardigan and a sincere card that said: “Something little for your package if it happens while I am absent, loves Diana.”

Rivett sometimes brought his daughter Kirsti to training sessions at the Kensington Palace. William and Harry would just know who could hold the baby, although Diana is not afraid to scold them when they disturbed the sessions.

The princess loved the ballet, extending at the helm and making cardio on the elliptical. She even asked Rivett to teach him Rollerblade.

In 1995, the tabloids nicknamed his “Princess of Wheels” after a set of sneaky photos struck the press.

“She had this juvenile energy and curiosity,” said Rivett. “And even if it has become a global humanitarian icon, it has never stopped being real.”