Prince Harry went “rogue” while discussing the Invictus Games’s first-ever launch, his friend has revealed.
David Wiseman, who’s been the Duke of Sussex’s good friend for a while, as well as a director at the Invictus Games Foundation, appeared on HELLO!’s A Right Royal Podcast and spoke about how the royal was inspired to create the Invictus Games after visiting the Warrior Games, a US-based event for injured service personnel and veterans.
He explained: “The morning after, we were sitting in a hotel in Colorado, reflecting on what we’d just seen.
“We were sitting down at breakfast, it wasn’t a meeting or anything like that, and Harry said, ‘Look, this is absolutely brilliant, what we’ve seen here is absolutely brilliant. What we need to do is internationalise 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.
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“He could see it before anyone else could.”
Wiseman described Prince Harry as the “visionary” from the very beginning
He said: “[Harry] has been incredibly involved and incredibly proud of his involvement in it.”
But he also recalled the time when the duke went “rogue” when announcing the Games’ launch in 2013.
Wiseman explained: “We didn’t realise the time frame that he made in mind. 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! We were like, ‘What? Next year?’ For a long time, there were three or four of us at the Royal Foundation managing this project.
“September 2014, we were there, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, it might have been by the skin of our teeth but we were there!”
But the team pulled it off and the Invictus Games launched in 2014, with nine nations involved, with Jill Biden attending as a US delegate, and the Foo Fighters performing at the closing concert.
Harry’s pal continued: “It was massive and we pulled that all together from May 2013 to September 2014.”
And he praised the royal saying that he “fits in, he’s a fun guy, and he fits in with that army environment”.