This week, Prince Harry is in the UK celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the first Invictus Games, the biennial sporting competition for wounded veterans that he helped found alongside Sir Keith Mills, an entrepreneur who helped to organize the 2012 Olympic Games in London. But during a panel discussion with Mills at London’s Honourable Artillery Company, the prince said when they first started planning for the 2014 Games, he wasn’t positive that it was going to work out.
Harry mentioned that he first got the idea for the Games during a 2012 trip to the United States, where he attended the Department of Defense’s Warrior Games. “Sport was the magic that I witnessed,” he said. “Having just come back from Afghanistan myself, seeing the wounded, injured and sick and seeing the effect this was having on all the families, and just the weight—the load on defense and on the individuals and on the rehabilitation programs. There just wasn’t enough being done.”
Upon his return to England, Harry decided he wanted to expand on the Warrior Games model—it was “stolen from the Americans and made bigger and better,” as he described it. He reached out to Mills, and over a cup of tea, they decided to take the project on. “We had this idea and not much else, frankly,” Mills said of the early months of work on the Games. “It wasn’t called the Invictus Games then, we had no money, we had no people. We just had a very good idea.”
Things finally came together when Harry arranged a meeting with someone in the position to help. “The next cup of tea Prince Harry organized was a cup of tea with Boris Johnson, myself, and Prince Harry,” Mills said. Former Prime Minister Johnson, then mayor of London, had control over the facilities used during the Olympics. “He twisted Boris Johnson’s arm quite hard to allow us to use all the facilities in the Olympic Park at no cost.”
That favor allowed Harry and Mills to go forward, and the first Invictus Games were held from September 10 to 14, 2014. “We called on a huge number of people who went way beyond what would normally be possible to pull off the first games, none of us really knowing where the first games was going to take us,” Mills continued. “But it was phenomenally successful and that’s the reason we’re all here today.”
During the panel, Harry mentioned that early on the Invictus Foundation decided that the families of wounded veterans needed to be included in the event, adding that he loved to hear their stories.
“I’ve had moms, I’ve had dads, I’ve had grandparents,” he said, speaking about the families that have moved him most. “I’ve had kids come up, hug my leg and thank me—thank us at the foundation for bringing Daddy back, for helping Mommy out. It’s a real thing.”
On Tuesday, Harry is set to join a service of thanksgiving in honor of the Invictus Games at St Paul’s Cathedral alongside actor Damian Lewis, who will read the poem from which the event got its name. He will not, however, see his father, King Charles III, during his two-day trip to the UK.
“It unfortunately will not be possible due to His Majesty’s full program,” Harry’s spokesperson told the New York Post on Tuesday. “The duke, of course, is understanding of his father’s diary of commitments and various other priorities and hopes to see him soon.”