In 2013, Prince Harry visited Colorado to attend the Warrior Games, a Department of Defense-sponsored event to honor wounded veterans in athletic competition, and was so inspired by the experience that he founded the Invictus Games, a version of the event that features players from around the world. Now that Harry is living in the U.S., he is teaming up with First Lady Jill Biden to honor wounded veterans.
The 2021 edition of the Warrior Games was set to begin this week in Orlando but was canceled due to the ongoing pandemic. On Monday evening, Harry and Biden will host a livestream event along with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Ken Fisher, a philanthropist whose charity supports the family members of wounded veterans. According to a statement from the first lady’s office, Harry, Biden, and Austin had all planned to attend the games in person if they had gone forward.
The fifth edition of the Invictus Games is set to take place next April in The Hague. They were originally scheduled for May 2020 and rescheduled to May 2021, but both events were canceled due to coronavirus concerns. In June 2021, the Invictus Games foundation announced that the sixth Invictus Games will take place in September 2023 in Düsseldorf.
In the time since Harry and Meghan Markle left their roles as senior royals in March 2020, Harry has continued to support charities that provide services to veterans and has even attended in-person volunteer events in southern California. Harry himself served two tours of duty in Afghanistan during his time in the Royal Army, and when the Afghan military fell last month, he released a joint statement with the Invictus Games’s chair, Lord Allen of Kensington, and its CEO, Dominic Reid.
“What’s happening in Afghanistan resonates across the international Invictus community,” it read. “Many of the participating nations and competitors in the Invictus Games family are bound by a shared experience of serving in Afghanistan over the past two decades, and for several years, we have competed alongside Invictus Games Team Afghanistan. We encourage everybody across the Invictus network—and the wider military community—to reach out to each other and offer support for one another.”
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