David Wiseman: Prince Harry was a visionary for creating the Invictus Games

David Wiseman is one of Prince Harry’s hottest friends and colleagues. I think Wiseman is a total smokeshow, if I’m being honest. Wiseman and Harry were friends for a while, and Wiseman was part of the Royal Foundation (back when Harry was part of it too) and then the Endeavor Fund and Invictus. I honestly don’t know all of the positions Wiseman has held over the years, but I know he’s still very involved with the Invictus Games and he was there in Colorado in 2013 when Harry began brainstorming Invictus after watching the Warrior Games.

Chatting on HELLO!’s A Right Royal Podcast, David Wiseman spoke about how they were inspired after visiting the Warrior Games, a US-based event for injured service personnel and veterans, with Harry wanting to “internationalise” the games.

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. He could see it before anyone else could.”

He added: “Anyone who sits back and is a bit disparaging… from my personal experience he has been the visionary from the very beginning and has been incredibly involved and incredibly proud of his involvement in it.”

Speaking about how his royal pal went “rogue”, he continued: “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! It was massive and we pulled that all together from May 2013 to September 2014.”

[From Hello]

Harry is such an executive, truly. I mean that as a compliment – Harry understands that if he says something needs to get done in a year, people will manage it accordingly. He didn’t want to be vague or leave anything open-ended, he set the goal and then made everyone work towards it. And I agree with Wiseman, Harry is a visionary. I mentioned this when we covered the Heart of Invictus series too – you could see how much the Invictus team values Harry’s input, and how important he is to the organization as a sort of global Invictus ambassador. I remember the Ukrainian team leader asking the organization directly if the Sussexes had confirmed their appearance, and her relief that they had.

— R.S. Locke / Royal Suitor (@royal_suitor) October 29, 2023

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

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