The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will be spending Valentine’s Day 2024 celebrating a cause close to their hearts, as they will attend the Invictus Games’ One Year to Go event later this month in Canada.
Over the course of three days in Vancouver and Whistler, HELLO! understands that the pair will join members of the Participating Nations Winter Training Camp, which provides an opportunity for members of the International Invictus Community, including team managers, coaches and competitors to experience winter adaptive sports ahead of the Games next year.
The 2025 games will take place from 8 to 16 February, and they come 18 months after the 2023 games, which were held in Germany and where Meghan hinted that the pair may bring their children, son Archie and daughter Lilibet, to the next event.
As she apologized for missing the opening ceremony, revealing that she was spending a little extra time back in Los Angeles with her children, she added: “I’m really proud to be part of this Invictus family with all of you. I’m grateful for all of you that are here… There are so many people we know back home who are rooting for all of you, even if they can’t be here with you, they are here in spirit.
“Have the best time, we’re cheering for you, and we can’t wait to bring our kids also so they can experience just how awesome this is. Thank you guys, so so much.”
The 2025 games will be held in Vancouver and Whistler, which are a three-hour flight from Los Angeles, and in the same time zone as where the young prince and princess are being raised by their parents.
Harry’s good friend and a director at the Invictus Games Foundation, David Wiseman, recently told HELLO! how they were inspired after visiting the Warrior Games, a US-based event for injured service personnel and veterans, in May 2013, with Harry making the bold decision to have his own games up and running within the next year.
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 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.”
“We didn’t realize the time frame that he had in mind,” David continued.
“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!”
The 2014 Invictus Games launch saw nine nations take part, with the now FIrst Lady of the United States Jill Biden attending as a US delegate, and the Foo Fighters performing at the closing concert.
