Time Magazine has released their inaugural Most Influential People in Sports list, the Time100 Sports list of the 100 most influential people in the world of sports, from athletes to coaches to sports journalists to team owners to… Invictus Games founder Prince Harry. Seriously, Harry made the list!! The list also includes: LeBron James (he’s on the cover of the issue), Lionel Messi, Hilary Knight, Aryna Sabalenka, Steph Curry, Eileen Gu, Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, A’ja Wilson, Caitlin Clark, Wemby, Rory, Ronaldo, Shams (lol) and many more. You can see Time’s full list here. Here’s the write-up on Prince Harry:
A few months after finishing his second combat tour in Afghanistan in 2013, Prince Harry lit the cauldron at the Warrior Games, a sports competition hosted by the U.S. Olympic Committee for wounded service members and veterans. He left the event in Colorado Springs inspired to build on the concept—adaptive sports for injured troops. “I thought, ‘Wow, look at the power of sport, look at how it is literally changing lives in front of my very eyes,’” Harry tells TIME. “It was so clear to me. Let’s invite as many countries as possible to make it international, because clearly more countries need to benefit from this.”
A little more than a year later, the opening ceremony of Harry’s inaugural Invictus Games took place at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. (Invictus, a Latin word, means “unconquered.”) They hosted more than 400 military personnel and veterans from 13 nations, including Afghanistan, Germany, and New Zealand. There have since been six more editions of the Invictus Games, with the last one taking place in Vancouver and Whistler, in Canada, in 2025: those Games included winter sports, such as alpine skiing, snowboarding, and skeleton, for the first time.
“When you are wearing your nation’s flag on your arm, on your chest, once that’s removed, there’s something that’s missing,” says Harry, who served for a decade in the British Army. “What we’ve managed to achieve through Invictus over the years is not only to give people their purpose and their meaning back, but give them their identity back.”
The Invictus Games meld Harry’s passion for sports–he participated in rugby, soccer, cricket, and polo growing up–with his desire to give back to veterans. “Sport held me together,” he says. “I was one of those kids at school who did not enjoy classroom work. If it wasn’t for the sports field, and the amount of sports that were on offer, there’s no way I would have stayed in school.”
Harry hopes to keep growing the Invictus Games and perhaps make it a two-week event rather than one, to give more service members opportunities to compete. “One thing that we really celebrate at Invictus is not only do we change lives, but we save lives as well,” he says. “That’s not based on anything other than the amount of individuals that come up to me and say, ‘If it wasn’t for Invictus, I would have killed myself.’”
In July Harry is set to travel to the U.K. for celebrations anticipating next summer’s Invictus Games in Birmingham, which will welcome some 550 competitors from around 25 countries and include three new sports on the program: esports, laser run (which combines cross-country running with pistol shooting), and pickleball. “To be amongst that community, those are the moments that I cherish,” he says. “You wish that every society, every community, had this same vibe about it.”
Pickleball!! I didn’t know that was being added to the Birmingham games. Anyway, this is really nice and really important – it shows, once again, that one of the biggest parts of Harry’s legacy is his creation of Invictus, and that’s why there’s been a years-long hate campaign targeting the games. To this day, the most rancid royal reporters and biographers are still making up vile lies about the games and Harry’s involvement in them. Time Magazine – much like the ESPYs – is effectively doubling down and saying, no, Invictus is legit, this is important and good and Harry is a global leader in sports. You know who didn’t make the Time100 Sports list? A certain football patron who was too lazy to attend the Women’s World Cup, and is too lazy to attend this year’s World Cup (unless England makes it to the quarterfinals).
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
