- Today’s hosts share a long group hug with Harry Garside
- Garside’s Olympic dreams were dashed on Monday
- Garside felt he had let the country down after his defeat.
Australian boxer Harry Garside shared an extended group hug with Today hosts Karl Stefanovic and Sara Abo following his highly emotional reaction to his shock defeat at the Paris Olympics.
Garside, 27, could not hide her anguish as her 20-year dream was shattered in just nine minutes on Monday night.
He fell to Hungary’s Richard Kovacs by unanimous decision in their round of 16 clash, a surprising result considering the Victorian won bronze in Tokyo and was aiming for gold this time around.
The popular boxer had to cut short his media duties after leaving viewers concerned about his mentality in an uncomfortably raw television appearance, having initially said he had let his country down.
“I feel like a failure,” Garside said in an interview just after the fight.
“It’s a wild sport, after three years to end just like that… I feel very stunned, I didn’t imagine this would happen.”
Speaking previously to Nine, Garside, who has been open about his battles with mental health, made the worrying admission that he is worried about the coming months as he comes to terms with his defeat.
“I feel pretty numb right now, but I feel like the next month or two are going to be pretty challenging, pretty tough,” he said.
Harry Garside has shared his heartbreak in an uncomfortably raw interview after seeing his Olympic dream crushed at the first hurdle in Paris.
Garside, Karl Stefanovic and Sara Abo shared a 10-second hug on Tuesday morning as the Today show hosts tried to pull him out of the funk he’s been in since the shock defeat.
Appearing on the Today show on Tuesday, Garside seemed in much better spirits and said she wants to show young people that “failure is just part of life” and it is our choice how we deal with it.
He said he had pretty low self-esteem when he started his boxing journey, but that has changed.
“The way to achieve self-esteem and self-respect is the way we treat others,” he said.
“And it’s those little moments in the day where you help someone with their shopping or you hold someone’s hand… or you do something kind. That’s how self-esteem is built.
He went on to say that he believes our mission in life is to discover who he is and that he is still on that journey.
At the end of the interview, Stefanovic said his mother told him to give Garside a big hug, before he and Abo stood up and the three hugged for about 10 seconds as the music played.
The Australian star was eliminated from the men’s boxing in the round of 16.
Garside will stay in Paris and support the rest of the 12-man Australian contingent before contemplating his next move.
Following the Garside fight, Australian centre Teremoana Teremoana became the first Australian to win a super heavyweight fight in Olympic history.
He stunned Ukrainian Dmytro Lovchynskyi with a first-round knockout in their over 92kg fight at the North Paris Arena.
He will now face reigning Olympic champion Bakhodir Jalolov of Uzbekistan in the quarter-finals.
“We are here to win and I am happy to have achieved that in the first round,” Teremoana said.
‘I wasn’t planning on going for the knockout, I’m confident in my strength, but the plan was to go out and box, and I was landing some clean punches and he was feeling it.