Prince Harry’s Invictus Games Is Facing Its Biggest Financial Challenge So Far
The Foundation cut veteran grants by nearly two thirds in one year. The cash reserves, however, kept growing.
Prince Harry built the Invictus Games on a simple idea: wounded veterans deserve to be seen. For over a decade, the world has largely taken the Foundation at its word. Now, when the accounts were read, the figures are raising uncomfortable questions. The scrutiny comes from journalist Paula Froelich, who sat down with Rachel Maxwell — creator of the YouTube channel Rachel the Copilot and the satirical Instagram account Montecito Minimalist — to go through the Invictus Games Foundation's publicly available financial records. What they found was a smoking gun. Watch the video here!
The 2025 Vancouver and Whistler games — which took place in February of that year — cost $63.2 million to stage for 543 competitors from 23 nations. That works out to $118,352 per athlete. Approximately half of that budget was footed by Canadian federal and British Columbia provincial taxpayers. Those figures alone would raise eyebrows. But it is what was happening inside the Foundation at the same time that sharpens the concern.
According to the charity's own 2024 annual accounts, the Invictus Games Foundation cut its direct grants to veteran organizations by 63 percent in a single year — from approximately $680,000 down to just $255,000. In the same period, it added a new six-figure executive role, grew its cash reserves to roughly $2.9 million, and paid its highest-earning staff member between $153,000 and $166,000. That figure sits well above standard pay norms for UK charities of comparable size.
The transparency questions do not stop at the accounts. Maxwell told Froelich that she obtained a partially redacted British Columbia government document, signed in March 2023, committing CA$15 million to the event — but with its entire budget appendix blacked out. The document also revealed something else: the game's CEO was seconded from the B.C. government, meaning taxpayers effectively paid his salary twice.
Shortly after Maxwell made the redacted document public, the Invictus Canada website was temporarily taken down. When it came back online, the document link had been removed and replaced with a Dropbox login requirement. The concern, as Froelich put it, is transparency.
Froelich also made a comparison with similar programs. The United States Department of Defense runs its Warrior Games — a comparable competition for injured service members — at a cost of roughly $2 million annually. Germany's Invictus chapter stages a similar event for around $200,000. Against those benchmarks, the scale of spending attached to the Invictus Games Foundation invites a question that has so far gone largely unasked: where, exactly, is the money going?
This is not the first time questions have circled the Foundation. Earlier this year, biographer Tom Bower wrote about Harry and Markle's appearance at the 2025 Vancouver games — referring to the event as 'the Meghan Games.' Bower claimed that following the perceived underperformance of the couple's Netflix deal, Harry agreed that Markle 'could star' at the sporting tournament he originally founded to honor wounded, injured, and sick military personnel and veterans.
