Prince Harry didn’t wait around when inspiration struck for what would become the Invictus Games. The Duke of Sussex got started immediately after seeing a U.S. version in 2013. According to a staffer, he even “went rogue” by announcing a date for the inaugural games, which came as a surprise to them.
Harry announced he wanted to hold the Invictus Games ‘next year’ after seeing the 2013 Warrior Games
Making a speech about the Warrior Games in Colorado during a 2013 five-day U.S. royal tour, Harry caught his staff by surprise when he added a line. Not just any old line. As David Wiseman, director of the Invictus Games Foundation, revealed on A Right Royal Podcast, he publicly stated his intention to hold the games “next year,” meaning they didn’t have long to organize the whole thing.
Discussing what they’d seen the day before over breakfast, Wiseman recalled Harry being the first to see the potential of the Invictus Games.
“Harry said, ‘Look, this is absolutely brilliant, what we’ve seen here is absolutely brilliant. What we need to do is internationalize this. We need to invite allies and nations from all over the world. We’re going to put it in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It needs to be on the BBC, this is going to be massive, we’ll have a closing concert.’”
“He could see it before anyone else could,” Wiseman went on. “Bearing in mind that was May 2013. We went back to the Warrior Games that afternoon, and he stood on stage at the podium. And I think it had been written in his speech, that vision to say, ‘Look, we’d like to do this,’ I think he’d added his own note that said ‘next year.’”
“He went rogue!” Wiseman said of Harry’s addition to the speech. “We were like, ‘What? Next year?,’ explaining it was a massive undertaking. “For a long time, there were three or four of us at the Royal Foundation managing this project. September 2014, we were there, [at] Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It might have been by the skin of our teeth, but we were there! It was massive, and we pulled that all together from May 2013 to September 2014.”
Harry left America with the ‘essential idea’ for the Games
By the time Harry put his feet back on U.K. soil after seeing the Warrior Games, he already had the “essential idea,” then referred to as the “International Warrior Games,” mapped out, he said in his January 2023 Spare memoir. Sharing how the games took shape, Harry explained he had to “pitch” the idea to the Royal Foundation Board and his brother, Prince William.
The timing, he wrote, then “early summer 2013,” was on his side. The Prince of Wales and his wife, Kate Middleton, were becoming parents soon and the foundation didn’t have any major projects in the works.
“If these International Warrior Games worked, they’d enhance the foundation’s profile, which would energize donors and replenish the foundation’s accounts many times over,” Harry explained. “There’d be that much more to go around when Willy and Kate came back full-time. So I was feeling supremely confident in the days leading up to my pitch.”
When it came time to share his idea with the board, Harry “realized how badly” he wanted the Invictus Games to become reality, and he got nervous. Nevertheless, the board approved his pitch.
Prince William didn’t react positively to Harry’s idea for the Invictus Games
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Meanwhile, Harry claimed William didn’t share in his “thrilled” reaction.” The now-41-year-old, he said, seemed “sorely irritated” by the idea.
“He wished I’d run all this by him first,” Harry wrote. “My assumption, I said, was that other people had done so. He complained that I’d be using up all the funds in the Royal Foundation.”
“What was going on here? I wondered,” Harry asked himself. “Then I realized: My God, sibling rivalry. I put a hand over my eyes. Had we not got past this yet? The whole Heir versus Spare thing? Wasn’t it a bit late in the day for that tired childhood dynamic?”
Harry’s Invictus Games are now perhaps the biggest event on his calendar. He and his wife, Meghan Markle, attend the annual games, where they often give speeches, watch events, and greet competitors and their families.
Since its inception, they’ve been held in five different cities around the world, the most recent being Düsseldorf, Germany, in September 2023. Next up is Vancouver, Canada, in February 2025.
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