WHEN I ARRIVE on the set of Harry Garside’s cover shoot with Men’s Health at a studio in Sydney’s Botany, the first thing I see is Garside throwing jabs into the morning air. He’s light on his feet, gliding across the floor as if an invisible opponent is circling him. I’m early, so is he. There’s no one around for him to impress with his moves. He’s not preparing for a fight or training for anything new. He’s just going through a routine he’s been doing for nearly two decades. Noticing that I’m watching, he gives a me a nod and beckons me inside.
The set is quietly buzzing with anticipation. Racks of clothing dot the walls, waiting to be tried on. Photographers, stylists and assistants are darting in and out, making last-minute preparations. In the middle of it all, Garside looks like a man at ease with himself. We steal away as he’s asked to sit down in the grooming chair and go through some wardrobe changes.
As a brush flits across his face and a comb works through his sleek, cropped hair, Garside gets to talking. There’s an attempt to cover up some of the scars lining his eyebrows. These, he says, are actually amalgamations of many scars, rather than two big ones. “I’ve got about seven different scars on this eyebrow and four on this one,” says the Ninja ambassador, pointing from his right eye to his left. “The newest one is from May of this year, from my last fight.”
The 28-year-old arrived on set in a charcoal-coloured knit jumper and is eager to talk about it. “It’s from this brand I really love called Haych The Label,” he reveals, not one to gatekeep. He’s initially reluctant to part with the garment when the time comes to change into some new attire, but he’s anything but obstinate.
A boxer by trade and an athlete in the most traditional sense, Garside has spent his life refusing to stick to the script of what those labels, and being a man, are supposed to mean. In the past, he’s drawn attention for painting his nails and wearing skirts. It’s something he’s moving away from now, but challenging traditional masculinity remains one of his central tenets as he carves out a life that fits him, not the expectations handed to him. Like, well, a glove.
“We don’t choose where we’re born, what body we’re born into, what race we are, what family we have, what socioeconomic level we’re at,” Garside says. “We don’t choose any of that, and none of it defines who we are. I think it’s a beautiful thing that we can wake up every single day and change our core beliefs and question things and challenge things. I’ve always been someone who’s curious about everything. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always been like that.”
With such a dedication to defying categorisation, it should come as no surprise that Garside hasn’t decided if he’ll try to make it to a third Olympics. And yet, when he says exactly that, it’s difficult not to be taken aback. Boxing made Garside famous, but now, he’s not sure if he has a future in it. “I’m in this transition period around what to do next,” he admits. “Whether it’s boxing, or it’s something else, I don’t know yet.”
An important decision looms. But any attempt to predict it will need to be made at your own risk, because if his past has taught us anything, it’s that Garside is impossible to pin down. In his own words, “If you say go left, I want to go right”.
Garside grew up in Lilydale – “The place with the chickens, although they don’t make them there anymore apparently,” he tells us. Lilydale lies on the outer fringes of Melbourne, where bushland laps at the bottom of the Dandenong Ranges and weekends, unequivocally, mean sport. Aussie rules, cricket, tennis, soccer, basketball – Garside tried them all. But in a house with two older brothers in a community he describes as “very masculine”, he often felt out of step.
“My brothers always seemed very masculine to me, and so did my dad. I always looked up to my brothers and wanted to be them, but I just felt like I wasn’t quite there,” he recalls. “It planted this little inferiority complex inside me. I think internally I felt quite soft and then I also got shamed a fair bit for being softer than my brothers. I didn’t know this at the time, but I think initially I started boxing to gain their respect.”
If sport was currency in this community, then fighting was shorthand for masculinity. At least, that’s the way Garside saw it, which is unsurprising given what he was watching on screen. “In movies, you see men fight, you see men saving the planet, you see men doing all these fearless things,” he says. “But inside myself, I felt really scared and timid. Maybe I watched too many Rocky movies, but I started boxing because I thought it would make me a man. I wanted to get respect from the men in my life by doing something that I thought was what masculinity was.”
Garside’s mother almost laughed when he first asked if he could try boxing, but the moment he walked into a gym, something clicked. “I fell in love with the sport within the first few sessions,” he says. Not that he was any good. “Shit no, I sucked,” he laughs. But his coach, Brian Levier – now 83 years old and still in his corner – saw something in him. “I didn’t have my first fight until I was 12, but when I did, I very much just wanted to impress that man,” he says. “He genuinely changed my life for the better. From a young age all I wanted to do was make him proud.”
Just a few years later Garside would indeed make his coach proud. And he did it on the world’s biggest stage.
On his right leg, Garside carries a pantheon of tattooed faces: Muhammad Ali, Vasiliy Lomachenko, Roy Jones Jr, Sugar Ray Leonard, Bernard Hopkins, Andre Ward. All boxing legends. Growing up, he studied them and soon came to view them as sources of inspiration. He had them etched into his skin as a reminder of how to carry himself both in the ring and out of it. Ali, for his charisma and conviction. Hopkins, for taking the right path no matter the cards you’ve been dealt. Leonard, his favourite, for the elegance of his fighting style.
He laughs when he recalls his first tattoo, his family’s birthdays in Roman numerals, which he had inked when he was only 14. “Funny story about that, which is not actually that funny: I got my mum’s birthday wrong, which is so embarrassing,” he says. “The most important one, I wouldn’t give a fuck if it was my brothers, but my mum? Jesus Christ.”
For Garside, tattoos serve a double purpose. They’re an avenue of self-expression, but they also remind him of why he does what he does. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Garside cruised through his first two bouts on his way to meeting Kazakhstan’s Zakir Safiullin in the quarterfinals. In the three-round fight, the first two rounds were a nip and tuck affair. In between the second and third, Garside took a moment to recentre, tracing his fingers along his family’s birthdates on his ribcage and glancing at the icons on his right leg.
Garside would land a handful of key blows in the decisive round, ultimately winning by a 3-2 split decision. The win meant he was guaranteed to become the first Australian boxer to win an Olympic medal since 1988 – at the Olympics, combat sports do not have a third place playoff and instead award two bronze medals – but in the moment, Garside wasn’t thinking about the accolades.
“It was an amazing feeling, but at the same time I felt like the job wasn’t finished,” he says. “I tried to hold onto that electric feeling of knowing I was going to get a medal for two or three minutes, but then it was straight back to work.”
The semifinal would see Garside defeated. And while he went further than any Australian Olympic boxer in more than three decades, for an athlete chasing gold, bronze can taste bittersweet. “I remember there were a number of years where I would look back on that as a failure,” Garside admits. “As an athlete, you want to be the best, and I wasn’t the best. That’s the reason I went back for Paris. I wanted to go for gold.”
That experience lit a fire under Garside. He went into the Paris 2024 Olympics with a renewed hunger for gold, having trained harder and gained experience in the intervening years. The result wasn’t what he wanted. He lost his first fight, broke down in tears, and went viral for his authenticity. “You put yourself out there to the world and you proclaim something and you fall on your face, it’s humiliating,” he says. “I think it’s important to be sad and to feel your emotions. I think I did that rather than suppressing them or running away.”
Since then, Garside’s mindset around winning has changed. “I’m not all about the medals anymore,” he says. “It’s more about the person you become in the pursuit of something. I collected a lot of evidence along the way that I’m not as scared or I’m not as incompetent or I’m not as incapable as what I thought I was at the start of the journey. I’ve shown myself that I’m growing”
It’s a surprising level of candour for a boxer, an occupation that is usually characterised by two personality types: the posturing loudmouth and the taciturn recluse. But then again, Garside has never fit neatly into a box, and his passion for being different is part of what makes him so magnetic.
Halfway through our cover shoot, Garside is standing behind a kitchen counter with a banquet of fruit spread out in front of him. A Ninja Stealth IQ Kitchen System – Power Blender + Processor Pro sits to his right, a Ninja SLUSHi over his left shoulder. As Garside begins loading the blender with the ingredients for a smoothie, someone half-jokingly asks if he can juggle.
“Of course,” he scoffs, taking some offence. Standing up straight and plucking three apples from the counter, he begins tossing them through the air. “You don’t have to ask me twice,” he retorts, before catching them cleanly with a grin “Fuck, that was a good one – did we get the shot?” When our photographer ups the ante – four apples, perhaps? – Garside shakes his head. “Fuck no, that’s hard.”
Garside is a natural showman. But if boxing gave him a stage, it’s what he’s done outside the ring that’s boosted his platform even further. When he first rose to prominence, he quickly drew praise – and occasionally criticism – for painting his nails, keeping a Bohemian wardrobe and speaking openly about mental health.
“I think it’s great that we’re all so different and unique,” he says by way of explaining his interests and styling choices. “I love this thing, some people love other things, you know. If we try to just be like everyone else, and be the archetype of what the old school traditional man is, everyone’s just going to like the same things and it’ll be boring.”
So when he does something a little out of the ordinary, Garside doesn’t intend for it to be incendiary. It’s all part of his philosophy of prioritising self-discovery. “For me, it’s about the journey of self-exploration and trying to understand who we are,” he says. Although, he admits he doesn’t mind being slightly provocative. “And it’s a bit of a middle finger to people who say, ‘You have to live like this’ or ‘Boxers don’t do that’.”
As for why he won’t let his critics stop him from expressing himself, Garside cites the book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, which claims that the number one regret is not living authentically. “This is the sort of thing people realise on their death bed,” he says. “I just want people to delve into their authentic selves from a younger age.”
Garside has actively sought to break the mould in terms of what a boxer can look like, say or do. You’d have to say he’s accomplished it, but as successful and likeable as Garside is, there are always those who are eager to fell a tall poppy.
In 2023, Garside was forced into the public spotlight for reasons not of his choosing. He was arrested at Sydney Airport and charged with one count of domestic violence-related common assault, following accusations made by his ex-girlfriend.
The accusations stood in stark contrast with the unimpeachable personality Garside had cultivated in the public eye. The charges were ultimately dropped – with Garside’s accuser handed a two-year apprehended domestic violence order after admitting to domestic violence-related assault and stalking – but the period left its mark on the boxer.
“It was just one of the most intense roller coasters,” he says. “I couldn’t go out for the first week because there was media out the front of my house. When I eventually did go out, I felt like I was seeing judgement in people’s eyes.”
He admits there were days when things got dangerously dark. At one point, he even contemplated suicide. “There was one day where I was knocking on some really dark places mentally and it turned out to be Mother’s Day,” Garside recalls. “I just couldn’t do it on a day like that. Knowing that my mum, if something were to happen that day, would have to wake up every Mother’s Day and remember it, helped stop me.”
But for all the hardship Garside endured during that period, there were lessons he took from it. “Looking back on it, I actually think that could have been the thing that really helped me mature,” he says. “The biggest thing I took from it was regardless of what the media think or what society thinks, I know who I am. I had my own back for the first time in my life in that moment.”
It’s the kind of story that strips back the myth of an athlete’s invincibility. And it’s why Garside has become such a powerful voice on mental health. And now that he’s moved past it, he has a new outlook on life that has opened him up to other possibilities.
Since the Paris Olympics, Garside has been exploring other interests and potential paths to follow. When I first spoke to him a month before the cover shoot, we talked about running. He was training for the Sydney Marathon, chasing an improvement on his already impressive 2:54 personal best. On race day, he ran the marathon as a Ninja ambassador and clocked 2:39.
Running, like boxing, offers Garside a test of limits. But where one is short and brutal, the other is long and meditative. Both have taught him lessons. “When I was young, I was obsessed with constantly pushing myself as hard as possible,” he says. “I’m probably doing more now, in terms of volume, but I think I grinded harder before. I was just unaware of the right things to do, how to recover properly, what to train.”
These days, Garside trains smarter. Recovery and proper nutrition are crucial for him, and using a Ninja blender to make a nutrient-rich post-workout smoothie has become a key part of his routine.
It’s something which, like running, has made Garside a more complete athlete. But when I ask if he took up long distance running to help boost his stamina in the ring in time for the 2028 Olympics, he hesitates. “To be honest, I’ve always loved running and lately I’ve just been trying new things,” he says.
Now, when Garside looks to his future, he’s unsure if it includes boxing. “I love boxing. I love doing it, I love the art of it, I love just going down to the gym, being around the crew and getting into the movement of it. But when I think about what I want to do next, I’m not sure if it is boxing,” he says.
Garside doesn’t want to commit to the Los Angeles Games yet. Boxing demands a killer instinct, he says – a spark that can’t be faked – and right now he’s unsure if he has it. “You need it inside you in those crucial moments in a fight. If I go into a fight without that spark, I’m gonna get knocked out,” he says. “In the past, I’ve known it’s there, but now I’m not sure if it’s there anymore. And if it’s not there, why not go and try other things?”
Other things could mean knocking a few more minutes off his marathon PB. It could mean testing the waters in different combat sports – he’s been loving Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu lately. Or, in a more likely outcome given his personality, it could mean something entirely outside of the box. Garside is open to it all. “I’ve been trying other stuff, like new combat sports, to try and reignite the flame inside myself,” Garside continues. “If it comes back, I’ll continue boxing. But if it doesn’t, I’m conscious that I can explore other things.”
The point, again, is not to be defined and not to be hemmed in. Garside has won an Olympic medal, made a stand against conforming to norms and endured very public battles with grief, but his greatest act of courage has always been refusing to play by the rules written for him.
Lifeline: 13 11 14
Words: Cayle Reid
Photography: Sam Bisso
Styling: Pat Zaczkiewicz
Production director: Rebecca Moore
Fashion assistant: Kailee Waller
Digital director: Arielle Katos
Grooming: Michael Brennan
Design: Evan Lawrence
Video: Jasper Karolewski
Head of Brand: Ben Jhoty
