The Danish former windsurfing champion married actress Jennifer Esposito on a beach in 2020, then went straight back into the water in his wedding wetsuit. Years earlier, his father, dying of ALS, told him to go all in on the sport and try to become one of the best in the world at it.
There were no guests. The wedding took place on a beach near East Hampton, New York, on 13 September 2020, according to a report UPI filed the following day. Jennifer Esposito wore a yellow sundress, a denim jacket and sneakers. The man she married wore a wetsuit.
When the vows ended, Jesper Vesterstrøm walked straight back into the water and went windsurfing. He had been doing that since he was twelve years old, decades before he met her.
| Full name | Jesper Vesterstrøm |
| Born | 25 October 1976 |
| Age | 49 (turns 50 in October 2026) |
| From | Birkerød, Denmark |
| Lives in | Sag Harbor, New York |
| Spouse | Jennifer Esposito (married 2020) |
| Children | None reported |
| Business | Move Equals Life |
| Net worth | Not publicly disclosed |
Vesterstrøm’s father died of ALS, a disease that slowly takes away a person’s ability to move, speak and eventually breathe. Vesterstrøm has written about watching it happen: someone fading “like a leaf on a tree,” losing control of his body piece by piece. Before he died, he told his son to pursue windsurfing at the highest level.
“He inspired me and told me to go live my dream, because we never know when time stops and when we will lose the ability to move. My dad gave me the green light to go and pursue my dream to be among the best windsurfers in the world.”
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What happened to Jesper Vesterstrøm in 2017
A short documentary about his father’s illness and his own windsurfing career, called Chasing the Wind, came out that April. He built a website the same summer, already writing about his father in the past tense. In August, dealing with Lyme disease and unable to train properly for months beforehand, he raced the US Windsurfing Slalom Nationals in Berkeley anyway. He saved his energy for the two or three minutes each heat actually required, and won.
That same year, he was introduced to Hope Loves Company, a charity that supports children whose parents have or had ALS, through the ALS Association’s Golden West Chapter in California. In November, he spent three days volunteering at one of the charity’s camps, at Camp Campbell in Boulder Creek, alongside children facing the same loss he’d already been through himself. The charity had been founded a decade earlier by Jodi O’Donnell-Ames, after her own husband died of ALS.
By the time that website went up, Vesterstrøm had also become a certified fitness trainer and NLP coach, and started a business on New York’s East End called Move Equals Life, teaching windsurfing alongside both. Its tagline: “If we don’t move, we fade away.”
The rest of Jesper Vesterstrøm’s windsurfing record
Berkeley wasn’t his only title. He’d already been Denmark’s national windsurfing champion in 2004, and went on to add:
- Winner of Formula Windsurfing’s Open division at Jervis Bay, Australia, in 2011
- US Windsurfing Slalom and Formula podium finishes in 2015, 2016 and 2019
He didn’t turn professional right away. He started windsurfing at twelve and joined the Professional Windsurfers Association’s world tour years later, in 2002. By his own description, on the same website, he’d spent twenty years travelling the world as a professional windsurfer. He once set his sights on Beijing 2008 and Olympic recognition for his event, though that particular path never came together.
Meeting Jennifer Esposito
They met in 2016, four years before the wedding. Esposito has since called it “the best way to have a wedding,” explaining on Live with Kelly and Mark that a livestream for family wasn’t possible because they live too remotely for a reliable connection. She’s also described windsurfing as “going 50 mph and flipping,” and made clear she has no plans to try it herself.
When Esposito needed money to finish directing her film Fresh Kills, she mortgaged their home to pay for it. “I have never in my life had someone support me 100% more than my husband,” she said afterward. In December 2024, when the film won her a Filmmaker on the Rise award, one of the people who left a comment congratulating her was Jodi O’Donnell-Ames, who founded the charity Vesterstrøm had volunteered for seven years earlier.
What isn’t on the record
Vesterstrøm’s own website hasn’t posted anything new since 2018. Everything documented about him since, the marriage, the premieres, his wife’s award, has come from someone else’s account of events, not his own. What he actually thought about any of it, in his own words, isn’t part of the public record.
