Unconquerable

by Boris Starling

  It wasn’t just the physical aspect of the Games which appealed to Harry, but the mental and social ones too. There is always a void when one retires from active service, and that void yawns deeper and wider when retirement has been forced on you in your prime. The Invictus Games would fill that void. It would offer, if only for a few days, the things which its competitors had been missing: their country’s flag on their chest or left arm, being part of a team, the quickfire dark humour, the camaraderie. It would give them that military fix which they yearned for; it would not patronise nor infantilise them. If they needed help, it was the help to let them help themselves. Allowing them that was as crucial as any minutely measured conventional progress towards rehabilitation.

  But the rehab aspect was not all that mattered, or else they could have held the Games in a sports centre on an RAF base. The whole point of taking it out to the public was to allow the people to show their support for, to paraphrase George Orwell, the men and women who let us sleep soundly in our beds because they stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

  It would be a chance for the public to say thank you and for the competitors to put on a show for them: a perfect feedback loop of spectator and gladiator. And therefore it wouldn’t be just the competitors who reaped the benefit. Someone sitting in the stands seeing the inspirational stories being played out right in front of them: who knew what effect that might have? Or someone watching on television at home, maybe someone disabled, who would see these men and women and think they could follow suit. Who knew whose lives might be changed by what they saw rather than what they did?

  So, yes, Harry should hold the Games, of course he should.

  Must I?

  In some ways this was the easiest one to answer of the three. If he could, and he should, then surely he must? Indeed: but in this case the emphasis was as much on the ‘he’ as the ‘must’. It is not fanciful to suggest that the Invictus Games would simply not have happened without Harry. No one else, literally no one else, had what he had: the royal title, the military experience and the natural charm. There were those who had two of the three, but only he had the lot. He knew he was in a fortunate position, one which came with a name and a lineage and access to all sorts of different areas. He also knew that he had a responsibility to use that position in a positive way, in the right way.

  The Invictus Games would be different because it would be forged not perhaps strictly in his own image but certainly according to his own values. It would be fiercely competitive, but it would also be fun. It would leave no man or woman behind: there would be medals of gold, silver and bronze, but there would also be medallions for every competitor in recognition that for many it was the start line rather than the finish line which was the real achievement.

  Most of all – and the comparisons with his mother are very clear here – it would be Harry giving a voice to the damaged and the forgotten, just as he has in Lesotho by setting up the Sentebale charity with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho to benefit orphans and vulnerable children, many of whom are affected by the country’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Harry is very good at making connections with people and putting them at their ease. Part of this is the fact that he’s tactile and relaxed, a normal person in an abnormal position. But it’s also because he’s genuinely interested in people: he wants to know their stories, he wants to know what makes them tick. He looks out for them. His emotional intelligence is extraordinary.

  I saw a small example of this when I went to talk with him for this book. It was an unseasonably warm day in March, and early on in our chat I quickly wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. Harry was answering a question at the time, but without breaking his reply he got up, went over to the window, opened it, came back and sat down. It was a minor thing, sure, but what was interesting was what he didn’t do as much as what he did. He didn’t draw attention to my (very mild) discomfort by asking me if I was OK. He didn’t ask anyone else in the room to open the window. He just got up and did it: thoughtful, scrupulously polite and totally without airs and graces.

  Can, should, must … The Games were on.

  Now all Harry had to do was organise them. And he knew the best man for the job: Sir Keith Mills, the man who had invented Air Miles and had more latterly been deputy chairman of LOCOG, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games.

  They met in November 2013. Harry said he wanted the Games to be held the following year, 2014, and in the interests of the competitors it shouldn’t be too deep into winter. September seemed like a good month. How about September?

  September was possible, Mills said. But with no venues and no funding yet in place – at that stage there was literally nothing other than two men talking in a Kensington Palace drawing-room – it’d be tight. It would be very tight. They were looking at an event only 10 months away. Harry would have to be involved every step of the way. ‘If we’re going to do this,’ said Mills, ‘you really need to be hands-on and involved. You can make things happen more quickly than I can.’ But Harry didn’t even need asking. He wanted to be in among it just as he had been in the Army, feeling the team working together. In fact, he quit active duty military service in January 2014 to devote himself to the Invictus Games full-time.

  Neither the competitors nor the spectators would have given this much thought, and understandably so, but events like the Invictus Games don’t happen just like that. They take an extraordinary amount of organisation across a multitude of different areas.

  Corporate sponsorship was the obvious avenue for the bulk of the money needed, but at such short notice that was easier said than done. Most corporations had their budgets for the next 12–18 months already sorted and signed off, and even the largest and wealthiest companies can’t just find the odd million or three stuffed down the back of the sofa. In came Jaguar Land Rover as official presenting partner and BT, Fisher House Foundation, Ottobock, PwC and YESSS Electrical as Official Supporters. The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry and the Ministry of Defence were the founding partners of the 2014 Invictus Games.

  Next, they needed a name. Numerous suggestions were bandied around, many of them variations on recognisably military words – ‘soldier’, ‘warrior’, ‘army’ and so on – until Major-General Buster Howes, the Defence Attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, DC, who had first invited Prince Harry to the Warrior Games, suggested ‘Invictus’.

  Invictus had most recently been a Clint Eastwood film about post-apartheid South Africa’s famous victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela (a role he had surely spent much of his life waiting for) and Matt Damon as a surprisingly convincing Francois Pienaar. The title – the word invictus is Latin for ‘unconquered’ – had come from a poem of the same name by the Victorian writer William Ernest Henley, which Mandela liked to read both to himself and his fellow prisoners during his decades of confinement on Robben Island.

  Out of the night which covers me,

  Black as the pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced nor cried aloud.

  Under the bludgeoning of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.

  As a summary both of what the competitors had been through and the values they still held dear, it was note perfect. And so ‘Invictus’ it was: the Invictus Games.

  As for the ‘brand’ itself, getting that right was absolutely crucial. Harry wanted it not
just to capture the spirit of the event but also to be cool and funky, something you’d actively aspire to wear rather than just shrug it on without being especially bothered one way or the other. The logo that was created, picking out ‘I AM’, so prominent in the last two lines of Henley’s poem, from the middle ‘I’ of ‘Invictus’ and the ‘AM’ of ‘Games’, was spot on.

  But the success or failure of the Games would ultimately rest on a group of people who’d been scarcely involved with all this frantic preparation. Indeed, some of them hadn’t even heard about the Games until a few months beforehand.

  They were, of course, the competitors.

  COMPETITOR PROFILE:

  FABIO TOMASULO, ITALY

  Fabio Tomasulo was mad keen on flying as a child. He was determined to join the Italian Air Force, even if he had to go in as a computer programmer or a mechanic rather than as a pilot. Aged 20, he became the first person in his family to join the military when he signed up for the Air Force, just as he had always dreamed of.

  Over the next decade and a half he held many different positions, including Section Head at the office of the Deputy Chief of Air Staff. Then early in 2007 he was in a car accident so severe that he needed to have his left leg amputated just below the knee: ‘The first few days in the hospital were very traumatic, especially psychologically. Suddenly I missed all those certainties that had brought me up to that point in my life. Will I be able to walk again? Can I resume my work? Can I support my family? These were the thoughts that plagued me day and night.

  ‘Then slowly, day after day, thanks above all to the support of my family, I started slowly to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel. After two operations I started to walk with a prosthetic leg. More than a year after the accident, I was able to return to work with the same rank as before.’

  Before the accident Fabio had been a keen sportsman: ‘I liked running and spinning, just to keep fit.’ But when Invictus came knocking in 2014, he decided not to do a sport he knew well but one which was totally new to him: ‘Archery had always fascinated me, but until then I’d never had the opportunity to try it. It was love at first shot! Right from the moment the first arrows left the bow I knew I loved this sport. I don’t know if I chose archery or if archery chose me.’

  Three months of intensive training later, he came home from London with a gold medal in the individual novice category: ‘I will never forget the amazing emotion of receiving the gold medal. Going up to the top step of the podium, wearing the colours of my nation – just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.’ Two years later in Orlando, by now too experienced to still be classed a novice, he won a bronze in the individual open competition and another bronze medal in the team event.

  Fabio is still an active officer. He has the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and is now Section Head Individual and Aquatic Sports at the Air Force Sports Centre – ‘As they say, the appetite comes with eating, and since I have the opportunity to train every day my passion for archery is still increasing. It makes me forget that I have a disability. Sport, particularly in a situation like ours, allows you to come out of your shell. Many of us hide behind what happened. Sport makes you feel alive.

  ‘Participating in the Invictus Games was really exciting and amazing, not just from the purely sporting aspect, but especially from the human point of view. Being able to share experiences with other soldiers, men and women who have suffered traumas and disabilities like me, was really significant and important, and it helped me to accept what had happened to me and to definitively overcome it.

  ‘Besides the spirit of sport, there is a brotherhood among us because we are all soldiers who have suffered injuries. And it is a way to share what we have become after injury. I remember as if it were yesterday all the people who cheered during the competitions and thanked us for what we had suffered for serving our country. It is an indescribable emotion that I will carry in my heart for the rest of my life. We are not what life has given us, but we are what we will do in our lives.’

  6

  NOT WINCED NOR CRIED ALOUD

  Even at nine o’clock in the morning, the Sports Training Village at the University of Bath is a hive of activity. This is a £30m complex, and it shows. There’s an Olympic-size swimming pool, a vast multi-sports hall which can be partitioned by thick curtains, a gym boasting every conceivable variety of weights and machines, an eight-court indoor tennis complex, a judo dojo, treatment rooms, hypoxic chambers that simulate conditions at altitude, and so on. And that’s just what’s inside.

  The walls are dotted with posters outlining 11 qualities of successful athletes: aggressiveness, coachability, conscientiousness, determination, emotional control, drive, leadership, mental toughness, responsibility, self-confidence and trust. It’s part internet inspiration quotes, part haiku and part socialist exhortation. Tracksuited men and women sit in the café with their protein shakes and recovery meals while analysing their sessions on laptops: heart and soul reduced to the pitiless basics of data. It’s a long way from the days when rehydration in university sports was the preserve of Messrs John Smith and Gerard Heineken, and when a fitness freak was someone who lit up a Silk Cut before and after a match, but not at half-time as well.

  These state-of-the-art facilities are not just for the university. The British national skeleton, bobsleigh and pentathlon teams have permanent bases here, and plenty of rugby, soccer and Olympic teams have used the place for training. Today there’s a county tennis tournament, Southampton FC’s youth academy players are here too – oh, and a training camp for those hoping to be in the British Invictus Games team for Toronto 2017.

  The Invictus Games triallists aren’t hard to spot. They’re older than most of the other people here, and they have more tattoos and fewer limbs. But no one gives them a second glance. If you’re here then you’re here to work, and it doesn’t matter who you are. A high-performance elite sports centre is surprisingly egalitarian in many ways.

  On the way out to the athletics track, I pass a poster with a Muhammad Ali quote: ‘Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them – a desire, a dream, a vision. It’s the lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believed in myself.’

  It’s cold outside and the track is still in winter order: the steeplechase water jump empty and covered over, the barrier removed. Far from the bright lights of summer night competitions, this is where the real work is done. There are two groups of people on the infield. Half a dozen women, including Mary Wilson, are inside the discus cage, participants in an impromptu ballet of demonstrating techniques and giving each other tips.

  Outside the cage, a similar number of men wait their turn. A wheelchair is parked up against a sturdy steel frame for throwers who have lost their legs: the frame is lashed to the ground and the thrower is strapped to the frame. The men chat and blow on their hands. They keep up a constant stream of good-natured abuse to the women, and get it back in spades. No standing on ceremony for the fairer sex here. If you’re here it’s because you were in the Forces, and if you were in the Forces then you take the mick and you give it too. Soldiers are very equal opportunity like this; they take the piss out of everybody.

  One of the women mistimes her throw. It slaps into the inside of the netting and drops to the ground. ‘I’ll give you a tip,’ says one of the men. He has two artificial legs. ‘You’ve got to get it out of the net.’

  ‘And I’ll give you a tip,’ she replies. ‘Never eat yellow snow.’

  They all laugh. The women keep practising while the men rub their arms for warmth. Eventually the same man as before says in mock-exasperation: ‘Right, that’s it. Time’s up, I’m putting my foot down.’

  She’s quick as a flash: ‘Last time you did that it went “boom”.’

  They all laugh again, louder and more raucous. The notion of sport as a substitute for war is one of the oldest clichés in the book, but it doesn’t seem too fanciful right now. Y
ou can see it in the way these men and women move around each other, instinctively aware of how much space they need, of where they can aim a good-natured arm punch and where they can’t. They’re back with their own kind, people who know and understand but don’t stare or judge.

  On the track, three men with prosthetic sprint blades jog gently round the bottom bend. They’ve left their everyday prosthetics leaning neatly against a wall – they change legs as easily as you or I change shoes and socks – and they carry themselves high on the ‘balls’ of their blades, which flex on every stride with the impact of landing and release.

  As they jog, a handful of the Southampton FC Academy kids watch them go. These boys aren’t yet teenagers, and right now their heads must be full of dreams of professional football and all that comes with it: the crowds, the fame, the nights of triumph and defeat, the money, the nightclubs, the cars, the girls. Yet most of them won’t make it. Some of them will almost certainly end up in the Army (or perhaps the Navy, being Southampton), and they’ll be deployed to whichever war we’re fighting by then, where they may lose their legs just like these men have. I wonder if any of those boys are looking at their future without realising it.

  The previous day, Leicester City had sacked Claudio Ranieri, the manager who only nine months before had led them to that unbelievable and unforgettable Premier League title. Watching the Southampton lads watching the Invictus Games amputees, it was hard not to imagine the whole thing as a morality tale for our times – a nice, decent man dismissed by people for whom results and profit are the most important things, while here blokes who had taken a year or two to earn what even a lowly Premier League journeyman makes in a week are running round a track for their own reconstruction rather than for money. Perhaps Ranieri would have enjoyed the company here more than at Leicester’s King Power Stadium.