Sandrine Goeyvaerts: “Performance means reconnecting with your body”

Sandrine Goeyvaerts is a sommelier, wine merchant, author, and outspoken columnist. Never where you expect her, she is now taking on the role of sports influencer. Portrait of a fighter who wants to make performance a way to reclaim her body, far from social pressures.

Sport as a rebirth

Until the age of 17, sport was part of Sandrine’s daily life. A back injury, however, abruptly stopped her in her tracks. For years, she gave it up, constrained by a doctor’s diagnosis predicting the collapse of her intervertebral discs. That was until late 2024, when she suffered a pulmonary embolism.

“A clot had formed at the outlet of my pulmonary vein. Which is a bit of a problem, because lungs are rather useful for breathing — and mine were struggling to get oxygen,” she explains, with a touch of humor. “I was literally out of breath.”

Unthinkable for Sandrine Goeyvaerts, who seems unstoppable. “The clot was probably caused by metabolic factors, maybe by my pill and by my lack of physical activity. Fortunately, I’m an X-Woman. When serious things happen to me, I recover very quickly. In three months, it had dissolved. To regain my lung capacity, I understood that I needed to move again.”

One step at a time.

“At first, I would miserably walk for 20 minutes, then nap for two hours, then go again for another 20 minutes. It was tough, but I kept at it every day. I managed 3 kilometers, then 4, and eventually I could walk for an hour without running out of breath.” Determined not to stop there, Sandrine is set on improving her cardio. At 44, she refuses to let inactivity slow her down again.

Mother of two, entrepreneur, and writer, she needs to weave exercise into a life already running at full speed: the gym is the best option. “I take an hour for myself. I put on my headphones and switch my brain off. I clear away all intrusive thoughts. I feel my muscles moving, my breathing, my heart beating. I reset myself.”

Performance means reconnecting with your body

Sandrine is like many women of her generation: always racing against time while being bombarded with multiple, often contradictory, social pressures. Each time she goes to the gym, she grants herself a moment of freedom from all that.

“It’s the great paradox. Through sport, I reconnect with my sensations. I forget about my appearance, while becoming more aware of my abilities. With every session, I learn to love my body not for how it looks, but for what it can do. My shoulders are stronger, I have the arms of a woman who can push a 100-kg sled and walk 500 meters carrying 20 kg in each hand. I’m not chasing the idealized bodies in magazines; what I want is to push further in what my body can achieve.”

Now, she sees it as a vessel that changes and adapts depending on life’s seasons. Her responsibility is to love it and take care of it. For Sandrine, performance means pushing this body—which society often deems abnormal or even sick—beyond limits.

“I thrive on being underestimated. Once I shared one of my performances on social media. A man I didn’t even know accused me of lying. He implied that a fat body like mine couldn’t possibly be that strong. I was so furious that the following week, I redid the exercise just to prove him wrong—and I beat my original time by more than 20 seconds.”

The discipline of recovery

One thing is certain: Sandrine is determined. For her, sport is also about cultivating discipline—something that carries over into every aspect of her life. Going to the gym three times a week has become, for her, not only a matter of physical health but also of mental balance, in which recovery plays an essential role.

“By getting back into sport, I was forced to think about recovery. Simply because, if I don’t hydrate enough, for example, I get awful cramps and soreness that impact my daily life. So I’ve started to think differently about how I eat, drink, and sleep. I try to get eight hours of sleep each night. When I don’t, I can feel it both in my mood and in the quality of my sessions. I alternate very cardio-focused workouts with ones more centered on strength. And of course, for recovery, I walk! What I want is to nourish my muscles as much as my brain. I’m learning to listen to myself in a new way.”

Recovery has become a ritual, acting as a reward after effort.
“In weight training, you quickly end upwith calluses and small cuts on your hands, so I overuse richmoisturizing creams. Generally, I have thin, sensitive skin, soit’s almost a must for my whole body (and it also helps to massage sore muscles).”

A different perspective on physical activity

Sandrine Goeyvaerts first gained recognition thanks to her expertise as an oenologist. But she is not one to compartmentalize. She quickly became known for her commitment to improving the visibility of women in the wine world and for speaking out against the sexist violence inherent in the industry. She also often uses her frank, uncompromising voice to denounce fatphobia. So when she began documenting her walks and then her gym sessions, her posts soon took on a militant tone. “At first, I shared what I was doing in a very selfish way. Telling my community about my new relationship with sport was simply a way to motivate myself. I wasn’t necessarily trying to send an activist message. But then I started receiving more and more messages from people who said that by seeing me enjoy moving my body, being transparent about my practice, they realized they could start too.”

As a fat woman speaking openly about her fitness journey, she is all too aware of the lack of representation in sports. That’s why she uses the platform her social networks give her to highlight alternative ways of moving.“I want to see fat bodies enjoying sports—not to achieve unrealistic aesthetic standards, but simply because moving feels good. People wrongly assume that weight training is a men’s world. But in reality, there are plenty of women like me in gyms. There are younger women, older women, women of color. I wish so much that they were more visible, and that together we could build new imaginaries around our practices!”

Recently, Sandrine even launched an Instagram account dedicated to her training: @bougeavecsand.