Photo: Nicole Ivanov @nicoleivanovphoto
Sydney McLaughlinand Andre Levrone Jr. are married!
The Olympic track and field athlete and the former NFL star tied the knot in Madison, Virginia, on Friday, nine months after gettingengagedin August 2021, PEOPLE can exclusively confirm.
“We’ve been waiting for this day for a very long time so just excited that it’s finally here and we can say we’re married,” McLaughlin, 22, says.
It was easy to settle on Virginia for the site of the most important day of their lives, the couple says: both grew up on the East coast, and Levrone Jr. calls Charlottesville, Virginia, his “second home” as a graduate of the University of Virginia.
“We figured we wanted to be close enough to family in the northeast but far enough south that the weather was nice,” he explains. “It’s a great spot.”
Even more important than the look of the ceremony, though, was the couple’s ability to just be “present” during the day, they both say.
Echoes Levrone Jr., “With having the majority of all of our planning and whatever anxiety out of the way beforehand, as we stood at the altar and looked each other in the eye, we literally, like, held eternity in that moment.”
He says his new wife is “down to earth, she’s cool, she’s not super materialistic. I was like, ‘This is the type of woman I want to be with.’ "
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Now, the couple is looking forward to growing together in marriage — and not being long-distance anymore (“Ultimately, just getting to wake up next to your best friend and tackle whatever challenges the day has is so exciting,” says McLaughlin).
“I have a vision in life, she has a vision in life, and we just kind of merged our visions,” says Levrone Jr. “And being able to just model that the two of us are partners and what I like to call ‘co-laborers’ in life. And in this season of life, me primarily supporting her and her dream and her calling, is fun for me. And just knowing how supportive she is of me as well and in the long term.”
Also in the long term? An eventual honeymoon — the pair is waiting until after the track season and eying a getaway in September or October.
Says McLaughlin, “We’re still figuring out where we want to go and what we want to do, but we’re definitely not taking that off of the calendar at all.”
Lindsay Kimble
source: people.com
