By Suneet Gill, The Georgia Straight.

Note: to read more about this opportunity, read blog post by Windsor Secondary Principal, Caren Hall on the Learn, Share and Grow blog.

​Prince Harry joined elementary and high-school students in Vancouver today (November 18) to launch a free Invictus Games school program.

The Duke of Sussex, who is the founding patron of the games, interacted with students and teachers from Shaughnessy Elementary School and North Vancouver’s École Windsor Secondary, as well as Invictus Games Team Canada members and alumni at the Seaforth Armoury as they worked on some activities from the school program, which aims to teach children and youth about the strength and perseverance of the games’ competitors.

The Invictus Games are an international, multi-sport competition for wounded, injured, and sick service personnel and veterans. The next games will take place in Vancouver and Whistler in February 2025, with around 550 competitors from up to 25 nations competing in adaptive sports such as sitting volleyball, biathlon, and wheelchair curling.

Prince Harry visited each of the three stations that students were working in. He said witnessing the students learn about the Invictus Games has had a profound impact on him, and that he hopes the program can extend the Invictus community to other schools in Canada and across the world.

“Seeing this program today in action,” the duke said in his address to guests, “you can really feel the energy, the enthusiasm, and the learning happening in this room. There’s a lot of excitement, so get ready, because we’re less than three months away.”

The duke also presented guests with a surprise: belt bags carrying a couple of tickets to the Invictus Games opening ceremony. He said he wants everyone, especially the kids in attendance, to imagine what it’s like for the competitors to walk into the stadium and wear their country’s flag after all the challenges they have overcome.

“You need to understand what that means to them,” Prince Harry said, “because that can be a life-altering moment. There’s resilience that is gone with that, there’s teamwork that has managed to get them to the starting line, and there’s courage in getting them to that point. For some of them, it is very hard to walk into a busy room—and here they are walking into a stadium with tens of thousands of people.”

The first station Prince Harry visited was manned by Shaughnessy Elementary School teacher Jessica Jagger-Doe, and was co-led by Team Canada 2025 competitors Robert Pullen and Wenshuang (Wen) Nie alongside past Canadian competitor Mike Bourgeois. There, elementary-school-age children learned about the Invictus Games competitors and created their own “I AM” statements.

“I saw so much creativity,” Nie told the Straight. “They were fabulous and they loved using colours, making the letters three dimensional. One of the statements I saw a kiddo write was that ‘I am proud of the things I do when no one's watching,’ and that really touched me. It was very invigorating. I took some of the energy from the kids—they seem to have endless amounts of it. Hopefully I’ll take that to the games with me.”

Nie, who is training to compete in the biathlon and skeleton, joined the military at age 17 and served for 15 years. She first started off as a diesel mechanic, but later went to medical school and served as a doctor in the military. She left the military in 2018 and now works as a family doctor in Calgary.

For Pullen, who will compete in alpine sit skiing, wheelchair basketball, and indoor rowing, taking part in the event gave him more energy and “little kick in the butt” ahead of the games.

“It's that 80-day push,” Pullen expressed to the Straight. “Back to refocusing and training. Snow’s flying, so now I can go skiing, and I'm just looking forward to it—every aspect of the games, not just the competitions.”

Pullen joined the military in 1988 and got injured in 1991, but was able to return to service afterwards. In 1993, he served in the Battle of Medak Pocket in Croatia—a military engagement that unfolded during a regional war in the former Yugoslavia.

“We saved a bunch of villagers,” he said. “We did a lot of good stuff under the auspices of the United Nations, but also as very proud Canadians. And then, over time, my back injury cost me to be in a chair. That led me to sport—more sport than what I was doing before and different sports, which then led me to the Invictus Games.”

At the activity station, he found many of the kids shared similar sports aspirations with him.

“Now they’re seeing injured people being able to do the same thing that they’re doing right now,” he said. “So that’s cool.”

The second station—led by Shaughnessy Elementary School’s Kit Lo and facilitated by Volleyball BC as well as Team Canada players Jean-Sébastien Bergeron and Francesca Colussi—consisted of middle-school-age students, who played sitting volleyball and got to learn about the adaptive sport’s rules. Prince Harry joined the students on the floor as they bounced a ball across a low volleyball net.

The final station had high-school students complete a study of the 1888 poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley and discuss the topic of recovery using the text. The station was led by École Windsor Secondary teacher Chantel Dubé, Canadian Armed Forces members, and former Canadian Invictus Games player Alaina Mundy.

Invictus Games 2025 CEO Scott Moore, Squamish Nation councillor and spokesperson Sxwíxwtn Wilson Williams, and MP Randeep Sarai—who also is the parliamentary secretary to the minister of veterans affairs and associate minister of national defence—and Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim were also in attendance.

The educational resources in the school program are free to download in English or French on the Invictus Games’ website until the end of February 2025. After that, they will be made available on the games’ foundation website.

With just over 80 days to go before the games begin, Prince Harry said he’s getting excited for everything—but in particular, the opening ceremony: “To see these individuals,” he said, “the Canadian team, the teams from around the world—25 nations—coming together.”