By the age of 20, Garside had won a gold medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast. At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which were held in 2021 due to the pandemic, he won bronze, becoming the first Australian boxer to win an Olympic medal since Grahame Cheney’s silver at Seoul in 1988. Still not enough, he reckoned. Still a failure. He wanted that gold medal. (Garside lived in Canberra for a year training at the Australian Institute of Sport in the lead-up to Tokyo. In his book, he says making the decision to stay there over the 2020 summer when everyone else had gone home, during the choking smoke of the nearby bushfires, was one of his lowest points. But, don’t get him wrong – he “loves Canberra. It’s a really cool, outdoorsy place”.)
