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Denmark

Who is Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark?

Crown Prince Frederik, the heir to the Danish throne, was born on the 26 May 1968 the elder child of the then Crown Princess Margarethe and her late husband, Prince Henrik. He was christened just under a month later in the Holmans Kirk in Copenhagen; he was given the name Frederik after his maternal grandfather, King Frederik IX and in accordance with the tradition in Denmark that those Princes in line for the throne are christened either Frederik or Christian.

He was mostly educated in Denmark, though in the early 1980s he was a border at the Ecole des Roches in Normandy, France, and as part of his Political Sciences degree at Aarhus University, he spent a year at Harvard University. He also spent three months in New York working at the Danish UN Mission. Crown Prince Frederik passed his MSc in Political Sciences with above-average marks and included in the degree was an analysis on the foreign policy of the Baltic States, somewhere he has visited on many times during his life. Following his degree, he spent time as the First Secretary in the Danish Embassy in Paris; he speaks fluent Danish, French (his late father’s language), German and English.

The Crown Prince saw the benefits of the chance he received at Harvard, and in the same way, the heir apparent in the United Kingdom, Prince Charles, has organisations helping the young, so does Crown Prince Frederik. Crown Prince Frederik’s foundation supports those who wish to study social policy and sciences; it provides financial assistance for studying at Harvard, and expeditions especially those to the Danish dependencies of Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Crown Prince Frederik is a keen sportsman and in his military training, trained as a diver who was qualified to be the Danish equivalent of a US Navy Seal or member of the UK SBS. He has not only run marathons, but also an Ironman triathlon participant, the first member of the Danish Royal Family to do so. It was also through sport and the Olympics that he met his now wife Mary at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. They married in 2004, and now have four children: Christian, Isabella, Vincent and Josephine. He is also a member of the International Olympic Committee, a role which he has indicated he will relinquish when the time comes for him to ascend the Danish throne.