It was 10am on a Sunday, and I, of course, was still in bed. In my floating consciousness, I felt hands on my shoulder—someone was shaking me vigorously. This immediately sent me into alert mode because being shaken awake had been a rarity since my secondary school days. I’d usually groan and ignore the person, but on that day, I felt sober. My eyes shot open to find my sister hovering over me, which was odd because she wasn’t someone to wake me up without a reason. When she spoke, her voice sounded almost puzzled as she said, “Kobe Bryant just died.”
My sister doesn’t watch basketball, let alone play it. I could give her two pictures—one of Michael Jordan, another of Kobe Bryant—and five times out of ten, she’d probably point to MJ and say, “That’s Kobe Bryant.” She’s clueless when it comes to sports, but she knew his name. She knew how important he was, and she knew the impact his death would have—not just on me but on the world.
“Without studying, preparation, and practice, you’re leaving the outcome to fate. I don’t do fate.” — Kobe Bryant
Perhaps it’s the idea of this man, who seemed to conquer every challenge he ever faced through sheer will, perishing helplessly in a fiery blaze. Or maybe it’s the heartbreaking loss of his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, alongside him and seven other passengers. Maybe it’s the cruel irony of both—a larger-than-life figure who spent his life obsessing over dictating his own destiny, reduced to a mere mortal, powerless during his final moments, unable to protect the daughter he cherished above anything else.
Whatever the reason, his death was devastating to basketball fans worldwide—so much so that it seems they’ve subconsciously created a religion built around him. Fans now hunt for significant sporting dates that coincide with the jersey numbers he wore for the Lakers, 8 and 24. Twenty-fourth of August has become the unofficial, official Kobe Day. Yet, in the recently concluded Paris Olympics, the gold medal basketball game between France and the USA fell on 8/10/24—a date that incorporates not only his Lakers numbers but also the 10 he wore as an Olympian.
Wait, so which is the real Kobe Day? Fans see his jersey numbers lining up on the calendar and convince themselves of a greater cosmic design. After all, what are the odds of the gold medal game happening on Kobe Day? They need to win gold for Kobe. Kobe will make sure Team USA wins. This is Kobe speaking to us. Ironically, the same men who mock women for following astrology now find themselves doing the same thing through Kobe numerology. This is precisely how fans have inadvertently formed a sports-centric faith around the Black Mamba, without even realising it.
For those unfamiliar, Bryant bestowed himself the nickname Black Mamba in the mid-2000s to create an alter ego that helped him separate his personal life and tap into an unrelenting focus on the court. Rumours suggest he drew inspiration from a documentary about the black mamba snake, admired for its fearlessness, precision, and deadly strike—qualities that mirrored his fierce approach to basketball. You still hear tales today of his unmatched work ethic, passed down by his peers and contemporaries:
Kobe played a bench warmer to 100 multiple times when he was in high school. In his worst game, he still won 100–12.
Mamba used to learn Spanish and French so he could trash-talk European players in their native languages and psych them out.
In 2015, Kobe injured his right shoulder in a game but continued playing single-handedly with his left hand.
During the 2008 Olympics, Kobe would come in at 8 a.m. with ice on his knees, sweat-drenched through his workout gear. Meanwhile, players like LeBron James and Dwyane Wade were still yawning and asking, “Where in the hell is he coming from?”
These stories now linger in the archives of YouTube, are given new life on Instagram and repackaged for new audiences on TikTok. Because of Kobe’s untimely death, these stories are on the path to becoming myths—but who’s to say they won’t eventually transform into legends?
Every religion needs a scripture; some kind of moral or ethical code to live by. Kobe fans, of course, have the “Mamba Mentality,” a philosophy created by Bryant himself that preaches discipline, perseverance, and curiosity. Bryant even published a book titled The Mamba Mentality: How I Play, offering a detailed guide to his mindset and practices. The book, like a scripture, contains personal reflections, wisdom, and lessons, and is treated like a source of truth for those seeking to emulate Bryant's success. Other elite athletes like Naomi Osaka and Anthony Davis have adopted this mindset, appearing almost as apostles to Bryant’s teachings. But this framework transcends sports itself—the idea that, through rigorous application of the Mamba Mentality, one can achieve a form of immortality through lasting impact and legacy is malleable and can be applied to various areas of life.
The idea of religious themes in sports isn’t something new. In the book Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon, Eric Bain-Selbo and Gregory Sapp posit that the human need that drives religious participation—a sense of belonging, identity, and emotional experiences—are the same needs that compel people to engage deeply in sports. Think of mass gatherings, chants, and superstitions that reflect traditional religious expressions. Are you seeing the parallel?
Kobe Bryant wasn’t perfect. In 2003, a 19-year-old hotel employee accused him of sexual assault. While Bryant maintained that the encounter was consensual, the accuser disagreed, leading to a civil lawsuit that was eventually settled outside of court. It was a horrific situation that left the victim scarred and Bryant’s reputation obliterated.
Redemption is a powerful narrative often found in religious texts, and Bryant’s life reflects this narrative of repentance and public forgiveness. Following his legal issue, he issued a public apology to the victim and began repairing his personal life with his wife and children. In the years that followed, his family weathered the storm, and Bryant matured. He became deeply involved in charitable work, particularly in youth sports, education, and initiatives that supported disadvantaged communities. On the court, he became a mentor for young athletes, positioning himself as a role model who inspired many with his work ethic and dedication. After his retirement, he became a primary advocate for women’s basketball, emphasising the need for greater support for female athletes—who historically received less attention and funding compared to men’s sports. As a proud “girl dad” of three daughters, Bryant dedicated time to coaching his daughter Gianna’s youth basketball team.
For many fans, the last image they have of him is of a tender, loving father who passionately shared his love of basketball with his daughter—a far cry from his younger days when stories of his intensity and playing style screamed macho, red-blooded energy. While we cannot speak for the victims or assume their forgiveness, in the public eye, this journey quietly marked the closing chapter of Bryant’s life story of redemption.
A decade ago, kids would yell “Kobe!” as they shot crumpled paper into trash bins. Whether kids nowadays still yell his name before taking a shot or have replaced it with “Curry” remains uncertain. The future generation’s understanding of Bryant’s legacy and its lasting impact is yet to unfold. Will the next wave of athletes born after Bryant’s death practice the Mamba Mentality as a guiding philosophy? Will they look to him and start praying before important games? I don’t know, but it’s fascinating to observe.
For now, what seems certain is the unifying power of Bryant’s legacy among his devoted fans. Across different backgrounds, cultures, and political ideologies, there is a shared identity and common ground to be had. This social cohesion spans oceans and borders, satisfying the human need for connection, inspiration, and belonging. After all, this has long been the role religion has served for societies, centuries before the deification of Kobe Bryant.
Mike Tyson steps through the black ropes and lies down on his back in the middle of the boxing ring. He looks up at the ceiling of the warehouse in the Las Vegas suburbs and closes his eyes. The makeshift gym is so silent and sterile that all you can hear is his breathing and the hum of the air-conditioning.
In a few weeks, Tyson will turn fifty-eight. He’s back in training for his first officially sanctioned boxing match in nearly 20 years—a much-hyped matchup with the influencer-turned-pugilist Jake Paul that is set to be held in a football stadium filled with fans and streamed live to a potentially massive audience online.
But right now it’s time to get to work. The warehouse where Tyson has set up his camp is next to the headquarters of the Las Vegas Raiders, and team owner Mark Davis is letting Tyson use the space, which is minutes away from Tyson’s house. Perhaps not coincidentally, the colour scheme is very Raiders. A tall black curtain separates the training area, with its black-and-silver weight equipment, from the rest of the more-than-15,000-square-foot structure and contrasts with the white walls and ceilings.
On one wall and hanging above the ring are black-and-white signs that read mike tyson boxing club. Behind a rack of dumbbells, there’s a large black-and-white poster board with a photo of Tyson—hands wrapped, towel over his head—and a quote from the former heavyweight champ himself: “Discipline is doing what you hate to do but doing it like you love it.”
His trainer, Rafael Cordeiro, begins stretching out Tyson’s tree-trunk legs. Then he starts working on his back. Tyson, who now battles occasional sciatica, grimaces softly as he leans forward.
Now loose, he gets up and walks slowly to the slip bag. He looks at himself in the mirror—a sweaty, jacked, older version of the “Baddest Man on the Planet,” who once rode on the end of a lightning bolt to the top of the world before crashing back down to earth—and places the bag against his forehead.
After a moment, he steps back from the bag, bobbing and weaving methodically at first to help hone his head-movement defence. The exercise quickens, with a bucket’s worth of sweat flying from the wrinkles on his head and the white hairs on his face, splattering against the mirror and the bag.
“I want to hit the mitts,” he says.
When Tyson gets back in the ring to train with Cordeiro, who’s covered up to his neck in pads, what follows is a blizzard of left-right-left-right—over and over again. The power of Tyson’s punches reverberates throughout the warehouse. In the moment, whether he can still punch with bad intentions after all these years doesn’t feel like the right question. It’s more like, Did you hear that? The sound of silence has been replaced by the sound of violence.
Tyson wonders aloud if Paul, his opponent, who is 31 years his junior, has any chance to touch him.
“Can I be honest?” he asks his team.
Please, Iron Mike. Be honest with us.
“I don’t think he can hurt me.”
He’s feeling himself. He spits outside the ring before turning to Billy White, a coach who has known Tyson since he was a teenager training with the legendary Cus D’Amato, for confirmation: “Coach, I don’t think he can hurt me!”
White smiles and nods. So does Tyson’s wife, Lakiha (known as Kiki), who is filming him on her iPhone from ringside. She also offers a reminder.
“Baby,” Kiki yells, “drink your electrolytes more than usual!”
Tyson obliges. He knows that Kiki knows what’s good for him. He takes a swig from his three-litre jug and gets back to work.
In the almost two decades since his last official fight (he fought an exhibition match against Roy Jones Jr. in 2020), Tyson has battled through deep financial despair, grappled with legal issues, struggled with a cocaine addiction, and suffered the tragic loss of his four-year-old daughter, Exodus, in 2009. But in that same period, Tyson has also become one of the more interesting and unexpected second-chance stories in recent American history—finding family, stability, and cultural acceptance in the process.
Today, he is a financially healthy family man and husband of 15 years, a New York Times best-selling author who performed his own autobiography as a one-man Broadway show, the owner of one of the nation’s most successful celebrity cannabis brands, and a podcaster who gets really deep—and really high—with his guests. This late-life renaissance has led Tyson to take on an opponent he knows he can’t knock out but wishes to take the distance: Father Time.
That Tyson’s return to the ring comes against Paul makes the event an instant spectacle. The polarising twenty-seven-year-old YouTuber has posted a 9–1 record since he broke into professional boxing. And along the way, Paul has become the face of the sport’s push to reach new fans by winning over celebrities, influencers, and disrupters.
Older boxing fans will be watching to see if the old champ still has what it takes to smack down a mouthy newcomer. Paul’s followers want to see him knock off a legend. The fight will be held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, home of the Dallas Cowboys, and streamed on Netflix for the platform’s 270 million subscribers in more than 190 countries.
Netflix has promoted it as potentially the most watched combat-sports event in history—making Tyson the box-office bridge between boxing’s former glory and its brave new reality in the world of social media.
“I don’t think this was meant to be done by any man but me,” Tyson tells me, his eyes lighting up with passion. “I love it.”
The world will have to wait a little longer than originally planned to see Tyson make that history, however. In late May, a few days after I visited him in Vegas, Tyson was on a flight from Miami to Los Angeles when he experienced a serious ulcer flare-up requiring medical attention. His doctors instructed him to dial back his training for a few weeks to recover. That meant the fight, which had been set for 20 July, had to be rescheduled for 15 November.
And the boxing officials in Texas say they will be watching Tyson closely to make sure that his stomach problems have subsided before they let him step into the ring.
The bout is scheduled for eight rounds of two minutes each, rather than the usual three minutes, with bigger-than-usual 14-ounce gloves. (Paul announced in late June that he would now use the 20 July date to take on Mike Perry, a former UFC and Bareknuckle Fighting Championship competitor, in an eight-round cruiserweight boxing match in Tampa while he waits for Tyson.)
Even before the medical incident, plenty of pundits were questioning the wisdom of allowing a nearly 60-year-old man to take such a risk. His medical setback may only add intrigue for many fight fans. The curiosity in the buildup to the fight has been mostly divided into three questions. Will Tyson kick Paul’s ass? Will Tyson embarrass himself and lose? And maybe the most important: Why is Tyson doing this at his age?
“He’s always going to be the man in a lot of our eyes,” says Ric Flair, the professional-wrestling legend and a friend of Tyson’s, who founded his own cannabis brand, Ric Flair Drip. “But I think he wants to be the man again.”
The Reverend Al Sharpton, who supported Tyson back in the 1990s when he was released from a three-year prison stint—after a conviction for a rape charge for which Tyson still maintains his innocence—describes the chance of seeing his friend fight one more time as “almost like going to see a rare piece of art in a museum.”
“Mike Tyson is one of America’s last originals,” says Sharpton. “How do you tell somebody who always did the impossible that they have to conform to the possible?”
Tyson knows that people are describing his decision to take the fight as the aging boxer’s version of a midlife crisis. He gets sensitive when reporters ask if he’s still got it, or when sceptics suggest the bout is a gimmick event that isn’t real. He simmers down a little when he reminds himself that most of those who question him have never stepped into the ring themselves. Still, his inability to say no to a fight—a mindset D’Amato instilled in him that has stayed with the kid from Brooklyn—has even surprised Kiki, he admits.
“My wife keeps saying, ‘You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to do this.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I do have to do this,’ ” he tells me, stressing that the millions he’s reportedly making from the fight “will not change my life financially in any way.”
So why is Tyson trying to chase and summon a version of his younger self—the ruthless ring destroyer who became the youngest world heavyweight champion in boxing history at age 20? It’s because he’s an addict. Always has been, always will be. But it’s no longer about sex, cocaine, or anger. These days, Tyson says, he is addicted to cannabis and to his wife telling him he’s a great husband.
Oh, and one more old addiction: glory. It’s the jones that hasn’t left him.
“I’m a glory junkie. I love people thinking about me all day,” he says. “I’d rather live a short life of glory than a long life of obscurity. It’s just who I am.
“This is all I started fighting for—to get all this fucking status. I’m going to be chasing it for the rest of my life. I know that. I’m never going to get what I want, because I’m one of those gluttons for pain. I can never get enough.”
A boy comes to me with a spark of interest, I feed the spark, and it becomes a flame. I feed the flame, and it becomes a fire. I feed the fire, and it becomes a roaring blaze. —inscription on Cus D’Amato’s headstone
Don’t ask Tyson if he’s an icon, or what he thinks his legacy looks like. Those two words make him wildly uncomfortable. “What is an icon?” he asks after a doctor’s appointment in late May. “I’m still going to die; I’m still going to starve if I don’t eat. Suppose I go on hard times and become a bum on the street. Am I still an icon? What is my legacy? Nothing but an ego. Who cares about my legacy? My legacy can’t buy me a hot dog. Legacy is going to get me nothing.”
And don’t tell him he’s the greatest boxer ever. That irritates him, too, even if he usually hides it.
“Let me tell you this,” he begins. “Fans say I’m the greatest fighter who ever lived. Anybody that is a great fighter who gets told you’re the greatest ever, you say, ‘Thank you,’ but that’s bullshit. Deep in my heart, I know these guys don’t know what a great fighter is.”
A week before we spoke in Vegas, Tyson had flown to New York for the first press conference to promote the fight. He returned to the Apollo Theater in Harlem, about four blocks from the old Dapper Dan’s boutique shop, where Tyson punched out the boxer Mitch Green in an impromptu early-morning scuffle in August 1988 after Green confronted him, saying that Don King owed him money. (Green left with his eye shut and stitches on his nose.)
The past is always present for Tyson. Video packages for the Paul fight are covered with clips of knockouts from decades ago, back when Tyson had hair and didn’t have the dramatic tattoo of a New Zealand Māori warrior on the left side of his face. When the press event begins, Tyson takes on a different role in this Netflix-and-social-media hybrid of a press conference: He’s the adult in the room. After a young boy who models himself as a mini Paul asks a couple of curse-word-laden, inappropriate questions in his attempt to go viral, Tyson asks what the rest of the room is thinking. “Where’s your mother at?”
The Apollo crowd laughs, as does Tyson. He admits he can’t believe this is a real press conference for a real fight. What is this he’s gotten himself into?
“Forgive me, I’m an old dude,” he says. “This is new.”
He can barely keep a straight face for four seconds as he faces off with Paul, eventually giggling with his opponent.
Videos of Tyson knockouts are nostalgia porn. Go on YouTube and you can get lost in the compilations of brutal hooks, vicious uppercuts, and slow-motion shots of his opponents’ unconscious bodies crashing to the mat. It’s what helped build the mystique around the fighter when he was first starting out, with local newscasts running video packages of a young Tyson demolishing everything in his sight.
“When you were watching him knocking out opponents and them flying through the air, it didn’t look mythical—it looked real,” says Jim Lampley, the former HBO boxing commentator who is now a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a contributor to PPV.com. “This kid was like nothing we had ever seen before. Mike became a cultural phenomenon from the get-go.”
It’s difficult to think of Tyson as being old. For millions, he is frozen in time as the 20-year-old who conquered the world and could not be stopped. That’s not the guy who is training to fight Paul. Sitting in one of the black-leather recliners next to the ring in the training facility, Cordeiro says he understands the care needed to control his fighter’s fire.
Cordeiro, who began training Tyson for the Jones exhibition fight out of Tyson’s garage at the start of the pandemic four years ago, is using the same message passed down by D’Amato all those years ago. Be the fire, control the fire, and turn the flame up to high when you absolutely need it.
“You have to keep the fire on blue. When the fire is on blue, you have control of the fire,” Cordeiro says, comparing Tyson to a stove. “Mike has control of the fire. But when you step inside the ring, he knows how to go high as fast as possible.
“You still don’t mess with Mike.”
Billy White, who has known Tyson for more than 40 years, since they were both with D’Amato, remembers picking up the phone in a church parking lot and hearing his friend’s plans and his message: I need you. White didn’t hesitate and is helping his friend train three times a day, believing that only Tyson could pull this off, no matter his age.
“He’s the ultimate warrior,” the coach says outside the warehouse near Las Vegas. “The gods have called him out. How great that they called on him. Who else were they going to call?”
It’s not a problem for Tyson that many see him as forever young and hold on to this image of him. Yet he knows what kind of person he was back then—ruthless, dangerous, angry. And now as a father and role model for his children, he hates what he was.
“He’s never going to leave me,” Tyson says of his younger self. “But you have to realise I’m not that person anymore. That’s just the reality. I’m not that person. I will never be that person again. I don’t like that person.”
Tyson wouldn’t be fighting Paul, he says, if there wasn’t a chance he could fail or be humiliated. As he talks, Tyson leans in and reflects on what he’s learned through failure. He speaks softly but never breaks eye contact.
“I learned about life from my losses. I’ve learned that as I get older and I lose my friends, my children, my teeth, my hair—and eventually, I’m going to lose my life—life is all about loss,” he says. “We’re going to be old one day. We’re going to lose our teeth, lose our eyesight, lose our hair, lose our dick, lose everything we thought made us who we were. We’re going to lose our identity. In the end, we’ll be grateful if someone has a picture of us on the family wall, if they even put up a picture of us.”
Failure is an advanced form of learning for Tyson, but he’s hoping to avoid another lesson in loss in North Texas. Tyson does have respect for Paul, who went from performing skits on Vine in 2013 to fighting in his second professional-boxing match on the card of Tyson’s exhibition fight with Jones in 2020. He still calls Paul a friend, even as the influencer has vowed to “knock this old man the fuck out.”
But Tyson revels in talking shit and trolling him. Like the time he called Paul “fat and funky” in assessing his opponent’s shirtless physique. Or when he said that a video of Paul dancing when he was 16 strangely gave Tyson an erection. Two days after he suffered the ulcer flare-up, Tyson couldn’t help but jab at Paul on X: “Now feeling 100% even though I don’t need to be to beat Jake Paul.”
The age difference between the two is an inescapable, circus-like element in how the fight has been promoted and covered. The 31-year age gap between Tyson and Paul is reminiscent of the multi-decade age gap presented in a fictional fight in the 2006 film Rocky Balboa. The difference is also greater than that in another major fight in Tyson’s career, when, at 21, he decimated 38-year-old Larry Holmes with a fourth-round knockout.
Tyson takes a breath before considering any parallels between this fight and the one from 1988. He is unbothered being on the other side of a younger challenger. Tyson, who is a summa cum laude scholar when it comes to the history of boxing, notes one “big fundamental difference” between the bouts. There are levels to these mind games, and no one has weaponised the word YouTuber quite like him.
“Larry Holmes was a legendary fighter who was fighting a champion who was active every day of his life,” Tyson says before his workout. “I am fighting a YouTuber.”
He adds of Paul, “It doesn’t matter how seriously he’s taking it. He is who he is.”
Tyson’s publicist, Joann Mignano, echoes her boss’s confidence: “We’re used to the doubters; we’re used to the haters. I know the Vegas bets are all doubting Mike. But he’s ready for war.”
What started out as a joke to some turned into a legitimate fight after the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation surprisingly sanctioned the match in late April. As part of the process, the agency required Tyson to take a physical, an eye exam, and a blood test, as well as EKG and EEG tests, spokesperson Tela Goodwin Mange says. The 19 years between Tyson’s last sanctioned fight—a 2005 loss to Kevin McBride—and the upcoming one with Paul was considered “but was not a factor.”
That hasn’t stopped many from wondering why the fight is sanctioned and whether anyone cares about Tyson’s well-being. Promoter Oscar De La Hoya, a former world champion in multiple weight classes, urged Tyson to be careful and said he was going to pray for him in what he described as “a dangerous fight.”
Deontay Wilder, another former world heavyweight champion—whose career has been trending down recently—questioned whether enough people give a damn about Tyson potentially getting injured. He said that Tyson was “too old for this.”
When I ask Tyson about Wilder’s comments, he’s initially calm about the concerns his peers have about him being seriously hurt: “Then let Mike get hurt. You don’t have to worry about paying my bills.” As he thinks about it more on the black-leather couch at his gym, he has more to say.
“Everyone says this makes no sense, but he’s how old?” asks Tyson about the 38-year-old Wilder. The younger heavyweight, says Tyson, shouldn’t feel sorry for him and doesn’t know him or understand him. “He’s not who I am. He can’t go to Mongolia and have somebody know who the fuck he is.”
In a brief statement, sent a couple of days before Wilder lost his most recent fight by knockout to the Chinese heavyweight Zhilei Zhang in early June, Wilder says he “would just like to wish Mike the best.”
Surrender was never in Tyson’s vocabulary. The word was not in the lexicon of Alexander the Great, one of Tyson’s heroes, so why should it have been in his? Still, he had to learn it, and quickly, if he wanted to save his family and maybe his life.
In his words, the journey to selflessness began a little more than a decade ago with the release of his memoir, Undisputed Truth. The cover photo of the book, showing an almost broken Tyson with some stubble, is described by the fighter as a reluctance to surrender. That period meant not just surrendering to God but also having to hear from Kiki and his family about the hell he had put them through to move forward.
“I don’t know if it feels good to surrender,” he says before his workout. “But it does feel good that it’s over—all the dark stuff is over.”
His light is Kiki, whom he has known since she was a teenager through her father’s connections in the boxing industry. They tried being with each other a couple of different times, but it never worked out. At the time, she was too down-to-earth, and he was not on this planet. Her patience and discipline were what he needed. He just didn’t know it. They eventually figured it out and have been nearly inseparable since Tyson called her after he got out of rehab. They married in 2009 and have two children, Milan, 15, and Morocco, 13.
“He finally found the right person. Kiki is a wonderful wife, and boy, she’s the boss, too,” Flair says, laughing. “We all need that.”
Gary Smith, the former Sports Illustrated writer who profiled Tyson in 1988, remembers how the odds back then were “monstrously low” for anything resembling the boxer’s life today.
“There was no way that this seemed like a sustainable operation,” Smith says. “Somehow, against every odd, it turned the other way. I don’t think you could have ever predicted this one at all. He may be the biggest proof that you just never know in life.”
Tyson is proud as he talks about how his daughter is now the avid reader in the family, joking about how reading Machiavelli and Tolstoy will make her feel superior to other people just like he did. The bout with Paul will be the first time the children he has with Kiki will get to see a real fight of his, but he hasn’t thought about what that’ll mean to him. I ask him about the importance of Kiki in his life. For the first moment in our time together, Tyson is almost speechless, trying to find the right words: “No one would think I would be with a woman for the rest of my life. It was almost inconceivable that this happened.”
He then exclaims, proudly: “And she’s a genius! She created the ears!”
Tyson is referring to one of his cannabis company’s best-selling products: gummies shaped to look like the ear of Evander Holyfield, which Tyson infamously bit off part of during their 1997 fight. Tyson has turned what was a casual and therapeutic appreciation for cannabis into a big business at a time when legalisation has swept across the United States.
His Tyson 2.0–brand products are now being sold at 745-odd retailers. He’s parlayed his celebrity in the cannabis space into a popular podcast, Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson, that recently wrapped up. He’s even taken on advocacy. Earlier this year, Tyson called on President Biden to grant clemency to all federal marijuana offenders.
“It’s a plant that makes you happy and hungry,” he says, admitting that it’s hard to give up and that he was not his best self around his family in the first week of training for the fight when he stopped using. “The family wasn’t friendly with me. I did not behave well.”
Before cannabis was Tyson’s therapy, there were the pigeons. So many pigeons. Adam Wilks never thought much of pigeons until he got to know Tyson as the CEO of Carma HoldCo, the parent company of the Tyson 2.0 cannabis brand. That started to change when the two were in Amsterdam for an event last September and Tyson asked Wilks if he wanted to drive a few hours north to meet a breeder of roller pigeons. Wilks agreed, not knowing what to expect or how long they’d be there.
“Everybody goes up to Mike and their jaw drops,” Wilks says. “I had never seen the opposite where Mike meets someone and he’s excited about it.”
They stayed until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, Wilks says, with Tyson looking starstruck. The family and Wilks had to go to bed but there was Tyson, in the freezing cold, hanging with the pigeon breeder and playing in the coop with the birds in the early-morning hours somewhere in the Netherlands.
And Tyson couldn’t have been happier.
Back in the ring at training camp, Tyson repeatedly lands lefts and rights on a padded-up Cordeiro until he gets his footwork the way he wants it. The former champ keeps telling Cordeiro, White, and Mike Angel, his videographer, who films everything, how much better he feels.
“It’s beautiful form,” Cordeiro says in his Brazilian accent, looking giddy.
Tyson recently got over a respiratory cold that he couldn’t kick when he was in New York to promote the fight.
“I’m happy to be back,” Tyson repeatedly says, feeling himself again. “I was fucked up in New York.”
The fire that burns inside is blue but Tyson is turning it up to hype himself up.
“He’s not going to hit me with the jab,” he promises of his fight with Paul.
White goes one step further to hype up his fighter: “He’s not going to land a glove on you.”
Tyson takes another swig of electrolytes and then looks in my direction. He rarely lets people watch him train who aren’t in his inner circle.
“I thought I was gonna embarrass myself in front of you today,” he tells me, relieved that he looked like a contender instead of a tomato can.
There are two things Tyson told me he is planning to do, before and after what might be his final fight. First, days before the bout, he will ingest a drug derived from the poison of the Sonoran Desert toad—known as 5-MeO-DMT or simply “the Toad”—for what he calls a one-way trip to meet God. He’s done the psychedelic close to a hundred times now, but he doesn’t know what he’ll talk to God about this time. He only knows it’ll be deep.
“I meet God every day when I look in the mirror,” he says. “Aren’t we images of him? That’s what they say in the Bible. So I guess I meet him every time I look in the mirror.”
The second item on his agenda will come after the fight. Whether it ends up being his 51st win or his seventh loss, Tyson will take some time to himself in his locker room at the football stadium. He’ll lean back in his chair and take that moment alone to hear his heartbeat. Only in that moment will Tyson, who was taught most of his life to believe that he was a god, know that he’s still fully alive. Even if the destroyer is no longer there.
“I’m 58 years old, and I’m gonna sell out an 80,000-seat arena,” Tyson tells me. “Hey, if that’s not godlike, I don’t know what is.”
For Tyson, it’s one more shot at immortality.
Originally published 15 July 2024 on Esquire US
It’s hard to find commonality between brands. It makes sense to have a rapper paired with a bottle of Hennessy (Drake’s “Demons”, Nas’ “The Genesis”) or have an artist give their spin on the decanter (Jean-Michel Othoniel, Julien Colombier)… but how do you justify the collab a Hennessy project with an athlete? What’s the spin when it comes to Hennessy with NBA legend, LeBron James?
For one, you highlight their shared dedication to excellence and pushing cultural boundaries. James has a list of achievements as long as his arm (given his 2.06m height, that’s a pretty long list)—the winner of four NBA championships; garnered four NBA MVPs; surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA’s leading scorer and others. Among its accolades, Hennessy is the world’s best-selling cognac, with nearly 40 per cent reach of the global market; has one of the largest reserves of aged eaux-de-vie; is the “MH” in the LVMH luxury conglomerate. In the field of excellence, the two brands (yes, King James is a brand) have a lot in common.
As a long-time fan of the cognac, James has visited the Hennessy House to witness the production and bottling processes. “[…] I was blown away by the level of care and craftsmanship behind each bottle.” James says. “This collection reflects our shared dedication and is something we’re excited to bring to fans everywhere.”
To celebrate his recent Olympic stint, James added his personal touch to the Hennessy Margarita called the “Henny-Rita” to showcase the complementary nature of the cognac.
On the packaging, there are James’ vibrant purple and orange hues with an illustrative portrait of the NBA GOAT and James’ trademark crown symbol is incorporated with Hennessy’s bras armé token. The packaging motifs are repeated on the bottles’ stylised labels and cap seals.
In 2021, Hennessy became the NBA’s first global spirits partner; in 2024, the Maison partnered with a basketballer, let alone, an athlete. King James can add that recognition to his decorated list.
The Hennessy Limited Editions (VS and VSOP) by LeBron James are out now.
It’s a familiar feeling walking into the Quah household for the first time. Tea-stained photographs of children plaster the stairwell leading to the second floor, chronicling a family’s history. A faded couch, likely a long-time resident of the living room, bears the burden of years of lounging. The sound of barking dogs in the back garden adds to the comfortable clutter of everyday life, speaking of days spent together—the beautiful mess. You would’ve never guessed this home houses three Olympians. That is, until you catch a glimpse of the three professional portraits of athletes proudly hanging in the living room.
For many Singaporeans, the Quah siblings are household names. Chances are, you've found yourself glued to the television, heart racing, as you cheered them on in international competitions. They are some of Singapore’s most accomplished swimmers, representing us on the world's biggest sporting stages. For the upcoming Olympics in Paris, however, despite their best efforts to compete together for the first time in an Olympic setting, only one of them has qualified. Eldest sister Quah Ting Wen and Quah Zheng Wen have been fixtures in the swimming world for more than a decade, yet it is their little sister, Jing Wen, who secured a spot.
At 27, Quah Zheng Wen finds himself in an unfamiliar position—watching from the sidelines as his sister prepares for her Olympic debut in Paris. “I feel sad; sad that I'm not there to experience her debut at the Olympic Games,” he confides, seated diagonally from me on his living room couch after a long day of filming. “I very much wished that this would have been the games that all three of us could go to together,” adds Quah, his eyes reflecting a mix of pride and wistfulness. “But I'm more proud than disappointed that I'm not there.”
He recalls his sister's tireless efforts to qualify for the previous Olympics in 2021, repeatedly attempting the gruelling 200-metre butterfly event before failing to qualify. “I felt incredibly sad that I was going without her,” he adds, “I remember thinking if there were an option to give up my spot for her, I would have.”
It's clear that family is of paramount importance to Quah. His greatest fear, he reveals, is the thought of losing his parents. This fear, he explains, has been a driving force in his life since he was young. "It's a big reason why I kind of want to start moving forward in my professional career, start being able to contribute more to the family so that my parents can kind of relax, retire, you know, do the things that they like, travel and enjoy life."
As an athlete closer to the end than the beginning, athletes like Quah face a unique challenge: the accelerated passage of time in their careers (and everything bad that comes with it). While the average person may not confront the physical effects of ageing until their hair greys and knees sore, athletes often hear whispers about their age by 30. Can Zheng Wen keep up with the younger swimmers? Zheng Wen should consider retirement to give the younger swimmers a chance. Quah is already past his peak. It hardly seems fair to label a 27-year-old as ageing, yet I’d wager this reality forces athletes to mature much faster than the average person.
"It's quite crazy," Zheng Wen begins, "your life as an athlete is compressed." He recounts his journey from being one of the youngest on the national team at 15 to suddenly finding himself the oldest male swimmer on Team Singapore. “I now stand almost completely alone at the age of 27,” he confides. “Even right now as we are speaking about it, that idea still seems foreign to me."
At only 27, it seems odd that Quah is already the oldest male swimmer on Team Singapore, especially given that this age often marks the peak for athletes in sports like basketball and football. When asked why this was, Quah attributes it to Singapore's intense academic culture and the corporate rat race where everyone’s racing to be ahead of each other. “To a lot of people, when you’re between 20 to 26, it's wasted time if you spend it doing sports because there's no money for one, there's no real progression, there's no kind of pathway out of sports into the working world.”
Perhaps this is why Quah finds himself in a situation where his younger counterparts are retiring as early as 18. Or maybe it’s due to the fact that no one younger has been able to outswim the UC Berkeley alum yet. “That’s one of the reasons why I'm still in it. I mean, if I can't be the best here, then I can't be the best anywhere, right?”
In the world of competition, it’s tempting to look at someone younger and feel a need to be better than them. The natural inclination is to believe that your greater experience and longer track record of winning should give you an edge. Plus, it's all too easy to imagine what these newcomers were doing when you were their age and write them off.
Quah, however, takes a different approach. Reflecting on his time training at UC Berkeley alongside Olympians and world record holders, he remembers the first time a younger swimmer outpaced him. “Even though they're younger, I never saw them as less of a threat, you know, I respected all of them equally.”
A mindset like this was vital during Quah’s journey through National Service. A series of deferments meant he was conscripted several years later than his peers, placing him in a platoon filled with individuals six years his junior. "It felt odd at first," Quah admitted. "I mean, you know, a lot of my sergeants and superiors were guys younger than me." However, Quah's experiences in competitive swimming where he'd learned to respect all opponents regardless of age prepared him well for this unusual dynamic. With a chuckle, he adds, "Men, you know, we don't really grow up too much, right? Men will always be boys."
Life imitates art, but is it a stretch to suggest that life also imitates sports? At 16, he set a national record in the 400m individual medley and made the Olympic squad, fighting to prove himself in London. By 20, he became the first Singaporean male to reach an Olympic swimming semi-final, placing 15th and 10th in butterfly events. Later, he’d forever etch his name into the front page of the history books, becoming Singapore’s most-medalled male swimmer.
Yet in 2024, despite the achievements, Quah finds himself, once again, needing to prove his worth after missing Olympic qualification. It’s a cycle akin to the human experience: bare and vulnerable we arrive, bare and vulnerable we depart; just as athletes begin and end their careers battling to prove themselves. In the case of Quah, silencing pundits isn’t his only hurdle, he’s also racing against the decay of time—which begs the question: with Father Time as his challenger, how fiercely will he swim this final lap?
“The older, more experienced and better at the sport you are, the harder it is to find those small things to change that get you that little fraction of more time,” he says. “But undeniably, I have to try, I have to try extremely hard."
His voice carries a mix of determination and wonder, "But that's the beauty, right? We never know the limit, we always believe that there's that 1 per cent we can change, that can make a difference to bring out a performance better than any you've ever put out before." True to his words, in his most recent swim before this interview, he achieved his fastest time of the entire year. “I'm proud to say that I never gave up.”
Given Quah's mindset, one might naturally expect him to pursue a spot in the 2028 Olympics. Yet, reality intrudes. “I think it's hard to say, in four years I’ll be 32,” he says with a tinge of wistfulness. “I do want to be able to contribute to my family financially and have my parents be in a comfortable spot but I think right now unfortunately in Singapore we're just not in a spot where we're able to push athletes for that long of a period.”
In that case, what’s next? Having studied neurobiology at UC Berkeley, Quah had aspirations of eventually becoming a doctor like his father but his perspective has shifted. “It was a long-time dream of mine,” he admitted. “But I just don't think med school is in the cards really for me anymore.” Quah appears content with this shift, adding, "I've learned to be okay with that."
To adapt and find peace in letting go speaks to a deeper maturity, one that Quah attributes in part to the life lessons swimming has taught him. “I used to think that winning was everything,” he admits. “Results were everything and anything less than that would be a loss.” This mentality drove him towards excellence for years.
Yet, as he’s matured as an athlete, he’s come to realise that the countless hours spent training with teammates chasing the same goals, the camaraderie—the journey, is equally as important. But perhaps the most valuable lesson swimming has taught him is gratitude. "Cherish every moment," he says, "because once it's gone, it's gone forever."
At present, Quah hopes to use his platform to encourage the younger generations of swimmers and to progress sports in Singapore. “In the past, I would’ve been like why would I want to do this (8-hour shoot)? I’d rather train, I’d rather be eating, I’d rather be sleeping. I could hang out with my friends,” he reflects, then adds with a self-deprecating chuckle, "Okay, not so much that one lah because I didn’t have a social life.” He goes on, “but I think this is an opportunity for me to share my experiences and show that it's possible to swim longer than five years.”
Singapore is quick to applaud its sporting heroes but tends to forget them when they stumble. In a sport like swimming, where losses far outnumber wins, is it fair to expect athletes to excel consistently without adequate support during challenging times? One can’t help but wonder: Is there a world where Singaporean athletes are rewarded when they win and supported when they lose?
Perhaps in that world, this interview might have taken a different direction—I would have asked him about the Olympics in 2028. Maybe Quah would have felt more confident about his Olympic future; spoken with optimism and determination about his training plans and goals for the next four years.
Regardless, there is no use dwelling in hypotheticals—the focus must remain on the present and the tangible future. Whether or not Quah competes in the 2028 Olympics, his influence on Singapore's sporting landscape is undeniable and will continue to be felt long after he hangs up his goggles.
Director of Photography: Jaya Khidir
Director and Editor: Nowo Kasturi
Creative Direction: Asri Jasman
Grooming: Christian M
Gaffer: Fang Yuan
Grips: Amos Elijah Lee, Ern Quek, Guo Wei, and Timothy Lim
Production Assistants: Ng Kai Ming and Syed Abdullah
Watch: Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra
Locations: Hideout and COMO Orchard
Animation: Joan Tai
It’s a swim meet of sorts. Ambassadors of OMEGA, Michael Phelps and Léon Marchand—two athletes who shaped the sport of swimming in their own unique ways. Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history with 28 medals, now passes the (Olympic) torch to Marchand, another legend in the making, beat Phelps’ last remaining World Record in the 400m Individual Medley. The latter now sets his sights on the Olympics Paris 2024.
In an exclusive interview, the two swim legends discuss that day, share their secrets to precision, their admiration for coach Bob Bowman, as well as the importance of OMEGA timekeeping.
When and how did you both meet for the first time?
Léon Marchand: The first time was in Fukuoka at the World Champs. I’d just finished my 400m in the preliminaries, before the final. Michael was in the stands and he called me over. It was the first time I’d met him and he said, “go get it tonight.” He was excited for me. I felt really good after the prelims. I’d met a legend and I was ready to go.
Michael Phelps: I said, “yeah, dude, just rip one tonight.” We’d messaged back and forth on Instagram, months before. I’d even been at the pool for a few meets at ASU where Léon trained, but we’d still never met. It was crazy. So, actually, the first time we chatted was in Fukuoka. Obviously, I hear everything that he’s doing from Bob Bowman. Coach is grandpa to my kids. He’s kind of like a dad to me, so I knew what Léon was going through just based on his training. I just said to him, “See what you can do. Records are meant to be broken.” This was the kid that was going to break my record, there was no doubt about it.
Of course, now we know that Léon did break Michael’s World Record. Take us through your different emotions in that moment.
MP: To be honest, I was trying to hold it for 20 years. So I got there. I can say I hold the longest-standing swimming World Record. That’s something really cool. But in Léon’s race, as soon as he turned with 100 to go, and he was a body length ahead of the record, I knew he wasn’t going to fade. As I said before, I knew it was going to get broken. I just didn’t know when.
LM: I’d been watching the video of Michael’s World Record a lot. The one from Beijing. I knew it was an amazing swim and it was a dream to maybe come close to that. I remember when I touched the finish, I knew I’d broken it because I just felt really good. The entire pool was cheering for me, so I thought, “alright, that’s it. I think I did it.” I took my time to turn around and look at the OMEGA scoreboard. I couldn’t believe it. I remember feeling really present in my life right at that moment.
MP: That was my last-standing individual World Record, but we’re keeping it in the family with Bob and Léon. So it couldn’t have gone to a better person.
Do you feel a World Record coming when you’re in the middle of a race?
MP: It’s just the sound. For every one of my World Records, the sound is different. I don’t know if it’s the energy, but it’s just a different feel. I always hear whistles, like different tones and it’s almost like you’re in the matrix at that moment. You’ve prepared. Everything is going well and you’re thinking, “Let me out of the cage and let me race.”
LM: Absolutely. For me, I think it was pretty silent until the 200 mark. Then, I guess I was at a good speed so people started cheering for me. And I could definitely hear it in breaststroke. Because in breaststroke, your head is really coming out of the water. The Japanese were cheering for it. It just feels like an epic moment. What did you say to each other after that race?
LM: Right before the podium, the first thing Michael said was, “Yeah, you can go faster than that.” (laughs). But it was exciting just to talk to him. And he wished me good luck for the next events that I had because it was only the first day of the meet.
MP: It’s just a bad-ass record. Right? It was a bad-ass swim. If you put in the work, you’re going to get the results. Léon is a perfect example of it. If he wants to go a step further, I’m sure he knows what he has to do. I can’t say it enough - he’s in great hands with Bob. I mean, Bob is a psycho when it comes to details. (laughs) I mean psycho in the best, most endearing, heartfelt, loving way.
So what are those details? What’s the secret to gaining a split-second advantage?
LM: I was watching a documentary about Michael and Bob a few years ago, and it was all about the underwater. It showed how good Michael was at going faster underwater. He was explaining how you could escape from the waves, the surface, at every turn. Just go deeper, push deeper at the wall, and work under the water more than usual. At the time, I was already quite comfortable in the water, but it wasn’t really working. So three or four years ago, I started repeating my underwater every day at practice. Every lap. Every turn. Eventually, those became split-second differences.
MP: I can echo exactly what Léon just said. Every single day, our coach Bob is giving us certain challenges to prepare us for the moment those lights come on. The most pressured situations. That’s why Léon and I have been able to rise above the rest. Because Bob has literally put us through every possible situation. So, if there’s a race that comes down to a touch, you can pretty much guarantee it’s going to be one of us that’s going to win that race. It’s because of the repetitions that you do every single day.
LM: I think practising with Bob every day is way harder than the actual race. We go through a lot of pain. But then, when I get to the race, it’s easier to actually try and win.
MP: Every day, across my desk, I look at a photo of winning a race by a 100th of a second, the smallest margin of victory. The reason why I won that race is because, in that moment, I knew if I take a full stroke, I’m going to lose my momentum. That’s only going to come based on the awareness that we have, and that we gain every day in practice.
So, it’s true, practice really makes perfect?
MP: When you have a training environment like Léon has, and like I had, you have some of the best swimmers in the world across all strokes. Léon is the World Record holder in the 400 Individual Medley, but he’s training against the top three, or top five in the world in freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly. They all want to win a gold medal. So you’re able to literally race the best every single day. And at that point, the more you do that, the more confidence you gain. When you step off from the blocks, you’re like, “Oh, I’m gonna rip that guy to shreds.”
LM: Exactly. I have a really good team, a really good group for training. I usually feel way more confident because of the work we’ve done before. It makes it easier for us.
Do you see a lot of similarities in each other?
LM: We definitely have similarities. We both work really hard. We love to push the boundaries of the sport, and we’re both pretty good at performing under pressure. That’s why we can do a lot of different events.
MP: We are both very dedicated, very hard-working. We put in the work to be able to have the opportunities. I see that based on what he does in practice. For me, I wanted that opportunity, and I wanted to grab it as much as I could. And I see that with Léon. You see him taking underwater to a different level. Ian Thorpe kind of invented that, then Ryan Lochte and I took it to another level. Now, Léon’s really taking it to a new level again.
You’ve both had OMEGA Timekeeping throughout your careers. What does that precision and reliability mean to the athletes?
LM: I don’t think I could do a sport where I get judged by someone. I think it’s just amazing to have this precise timekeeping because you remove any injustice or unfairness. We can just accept the victories. The results don’t lie. That’s the numbers. And I do really think it helps the sport overall to make it better and faster.
MP: That photo of me winning a race by a 100th of a second against [Milorad] Čavić, they were able to go down to the 1,000th of a second just to prove it. It’s the best timing on the planet. I’ve won every one of my Olympic medals through OMEGA timekeeping. I guess I’m extremely biased, but they’re the best. From the year 2000 to 2020, we’ve been able to see so many different improvements that have really benefited the sport. We have these unbelievable timing systems, we have these unbelievable starting blocks. These things are small details that are helping us take the sport to a new level.
One recent innovation from OMEGA is the measurement of live data—such as the number of strokes, the live positions, and even acceleration. Do you think this data will help coaches and athletes in the sport?
LM: I think the data can allow us to improve our technique or movement. It’s all about detail. If we get that information, we can improve some things. We can improve the quality of our practice and use it to get faster. I think it’s definitely helping the sport. For example, I’m working on trying to hold my speed underwater, because I get a lot of speed during the underwater. So data like that could definitely help me to maybe see where I could improve my stroke and just hold that speed throughout the race.
MP: For me, I think it really shows where our deficiencies are. As Léon was saying, when you look at acceleration, for example, you’re able to break it down into bigger details. You can look at stroke control, you can look at the distance for stroke, all of these fine things. I’m kind of a geek in that way. The more knowledge I have, and the more information I have, then I’m going to use it to my advantage. I think it’s truly a game changer. And then from a broadcast perspective, again, I’m a nerd with that stuff. If I see somebody slowing down, and somebody else is saying they’re gonna win, that’s something I can easily point out with the data. It’s all the small details that the public doesn’t see.
Do you have a favourite OMEGA watch?
LM: I really like the new Speedmaster Chronoscope. The one created for Paris 2024.
MP: That thing is unreal. As soon as it went online, I instantly started screenshotting it and putting it on my wish list. I guess I’m a big Speedmaster guy and I love anything gold or Sedna Gold. The CK 2998, I have that one. It’s a limited edition and it has my son’s name engraved on the back. But then, I can’t forget my all-time favourite—my own Planet Ocean. As a kid growing up, I never thought that I would have a watch created in my name.
LM: I think I love Speedmasters the most. I am wearing the Speedmaster Moonwatch now and I love it.
And talking about speed… Léon, is there one Michael Phelps race that inspires you the most?
LM: Yes, it was Michael’s 200m butterfly race in the 2008 Olympic Games final. Because he won that race even though his goggles filled with water. It’s like being blindfolded. A nightmare. I wouldn’t want to be in that position. You couldn’t see anything right?
MP: Nothing after the first 25. I couldn’t see a thing.
LM: That’s crazy. But for him, it didn’t matter. He didn’t give up. I thought it was really impressive to just see how mentally prepared he was. How bad he wanted to win. That was really inspiring to me.
MP: I was so annoyed about it. I probably could have gone 1:50 that day, you know, to be honest. I think that was the reason I was most upset.
And Michael, what is it about Léon that impresses you most?
MP: His 400m Individual Medley is awesome, but obviously, he’s an unbelievable breaststroker. He swims a great 200m butterfly. He’s not just a “one trick pony.” I think it’ll be fun to really see him expand if he wants to, or really hyper-focus and take it to a new level. I think Léon is somebody who is special. You don’t see too many swimmers who are doing the things that he’s doing. For me as a swimming nerd, it’s fun to see.
We now have Paris 2024 coming up in Léon’s home country. Outside the sports, what things should visitors do in the host city?
LM: I don’t live in Paris, but I’ve had some great advice from friends who are there. Maybe have dinner with a view of the Louvre. Or grab some pastries from Cedric Grolet. He has a super cool Instagram page and it’s pretty beautiful what he’s doing. Then, of course, you can watch the sunset from the roofs of Paris, or spend a night at the Molitor Hotel. The pool there is crazy. You’ve already been there, right Michael?
MP: Yes, that’s the one by Roland Garros, right? I’ve had some cool experiences in Paris. My wife and I spent some time over there. We’ve had dinner a handful of times just staring at the Eiffel Tower. We’ve gotten to the Louvre, in fact, we’ve gone to almost every museum. Honestly, I think the coolest thing about the Olympics is just being able to enjoy every culture.
And one final question for both of you. You probably can’t be separated in swimming, but in which other sports do you think you could beat each other?
LM: Oh my God, I’m really bad at any sports played on the ground.
MP: I’ve got golf handled then.
LM: Yeah, you can have that for sure. Maybe foosball. Have you played foosball before?
MP: I’m terrible. Terrible.
LM: My dad is pretty good. So he can teach me. I’ll choose that. (laughs)
WHO WOULD BE A COACH? That is the question that might have formed on the lips of anyone watching former Australian rugby coach Eddie Jones’ terse press conference following the Wallabies’ 40-6 thrashing by Wales at the Rugby World Cup in France earlier this year. Jones was in the hot seat, a position in which all coaches at the highest level find themselves at some point. It’s part of the job, if you can call what is a multidimensional, intensely scrutinised and, for some, all-consuming obsession, a job.
“I don’t consider coaching to be a career in any way, shape or form,” says Michael Cheika, coach of the Argentinian rugby team, a former World Rugby Coach of the Year and one of the few people who might have had a real understanding of how Jones was feeling in that moment, having coached the Wallabies from 2014 to 2019. “One day when I grow up, I’m going to have to get a proper job, just like everyone else. I think this is... it’s a lifestyle.”
Cheika, 56, who is speaking to me today from his living room in Paris where he currently lives, loves the real-time, week-by-week, game-by-game accountability of his role (he refuses to call it a job). “That is the best because you know that the day-to-day will get you to the better results later on,” he says. “The ups are never as good if you haven’t had the downs. So, the thing I enjoy most is that attention to results.”
Cheika’s attitude is one that’s built not so much on self-confidence—though, of course, that is important—but supreme self-belief. “Confidence can come and go,” he says. “You can be swayed with confidence. Because after a bad result, you could have your doubts. But what brings you back is that sense of self-belief, that you know what you can do, and what you can achieve.”
If you want to know whether you truly love something, you can get pretty clear confirmation when the things you enjoy about it are the same ones as those you find challenging. Or as pop culture’s most recent coach du jour Ted Lasso has said: “Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse, isn’t it? If you’re comfortable while you’re doing it, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
“Mental health in COACHING is a case of whatever doesn’t KILL you makes you stronger.”
Comfort certainly isn’t something you’ll find in abundance in elite-level coaching. This is a role that puts you on a war footing with failure. One in which pressure is a ceaseless companion, scrutiny can be forensic, and all that really matter, regardless of how much an organisation might bang on about about culture and development, are wins and losses that are there for all to see. Succeed and you’re a saint. Fail and you’re a sinner. As Tom Sizemore’s character says in Michael Mann’s Heat, “The action is the juice”. And if it’s not, well, you should probably find another gig.
In that sense, you could call the coaching environment at the top level of professional sports a cauldron. The mental strength required to operate under such a cutthroat dynamic is difficult to fathom. But mental strength is built on mental health. And while the psychological demands faced by players have become a major focus in the past decade, the same can’t be said of the mental burden carried by coaches. Does the authority and visibility of the position preclude it? Could an admission of weakness and vulnerability put your job at risk? In all likelihood, yes. But there is also the possibility that coaches, the ones who’ve survived, are mentally stronger because they have faced adversity, shouldered responsibility and been held accountable.
“I think that mental health in coaching is a case of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Because if you are to survive long enough as a coach, you’re going to encounter all kinds of anxiety and depression, but you’re going to overcome them,” says Dr Bill Steffen, a former division one soccer coach in the US, and assistant professor in sports science at Wingate University in North Carolina, whose primary research focus is mental toughness in coaching. “You’re going to inoculate yourself to those two conditions. Yeah, you get depressed. Yeah, you get anxious. But you figure out how to handle it, or you don’t, in which case you exit coaching.”
If that is the case, could it be that the seat Jones was occupying at that press conference back in September, while hot enough, perhaps, to scold or even brand him, was one he could endure? Because coaching isn’t so much a cauldron as it is a crucible.
WHEN BRIAN GOORJIAN WAS appointed head coach of the Boomers in 2001 after more than a decade as an NBL coach, he had a very human reaction: am I good enough? “I was excited when I got the position, but as soon as I got it, I’d have to say I felt overwhelmed because the responsibility is huge,” says Goorjian, who’s enjoying a view of the Melbourne skyline on a clear Friday morning, as he speaks to me from his apartment in Prahan. “I thought, Am I good enough to do this? Everyone has those doubts in them and people don’t realise that. You feel insecure. This isn’t just you and your team. This is a country.”
Goorjian, whose heavy Californian twang remains strong despite emigrating here in the late ’70s, found his doubt disappeared once he entered the Boomers’ camp and immersed himself in the day-to- day minutiae of coaching, otherwise known as the X’s and O’s. There, the players and support staff would likely have never twigged that their loquacious, at times temperamental, always passionate coach might have felt unsure of himself. And Goorjian wasn’t about to tell them.
In a leadership position that hinges on authority and respect, there’s not a lot of room for outward expressions of uncertainty.
The popular image of the coach as a solitary figure on the sidelines of games means they’re easily reduced to caricature, at least by their critics in the media and in the often hackneyed archetypes they inhabit in popular culture—stubborn, taciturn, volatile, tight-lipped and inscrutable are a few of the more common adjectives used to describe top-level coaches. Lasso, in his unrelentingly cheesy and avuncular nature, clearly bucks the stereotype. But you do have to wonder how much coaches’ public profiles match their private personas. “I’ve spoken with coaches that say, ‘Yeah, I’m screaming just to scream, just to be a presence so that it looks like I’m doing things, even though I know I’m not’,” says Steffen.
Anson Dorrance, coach of the division one women’s soccer team at the University of North Carolina and former coach of the USWNT that won the inaugural Women’s World Cup in 1991, says many people are surprised when he describes himself as an introvert. “I’m a radical introvert,” says Dorrance from his car on the way home from practice in Chapel Hill. “So for me, even on this phone call, this is a performance. This isn’t me. This is me acting like the women’s soccer coach at the University of North Carolina.”
So, what defines mental toughness as it relates to coaching? Steffen conducted a study in which he and his team asked 22 elite-level coaches in the US that very question. The coaches surveyed came up with 46 characteristics, which were then narrowed down to a top 10. Confidence was rated the most important component in a coach’s mental make-up, followed by resilience, consistency, positivity, energy, passion, optimism, adaptability, inner strength and patience. The coaches were then asked if they thought these traits needed to be innate or could be developed. “Most thought it could be developed because a number of them said they weren’t mentally tough when they started coaching,” says Steffen. “Resilience is adversity and adjustment, and if you don’t have adversity, you can’t be resilient. Most coaches had some difficult times, yet they adjusted, they adapted, then they developed that resiliency.”
Cheika agrees coaches need to be mentally agile to succeed. “I’ve got an open mind as a coach but can also be very authoritarian,” he says. “I think that’s a real skill: to be able to be flexible, but to have single-mindedness when necessary. And then not be afraid to change if you feel like, Oh, no, this actually is better.”
Underpinning all of these traits is often an insane level of competitiveness. “Most people that think they’re competitive, I don’t think are competitive,” says Dorrance, who gleefully tells me he was the subject of a celebrated book, The Man Watching, which includes a chapter in which “everyone who hates me gives their opinion on me”.
It was Dorrance’s competitiveness that drove him, during one year of his 47-year tenure at UNC, to take a single Thursday afternoon off. “I was ok with that,” says the 72-year- old, who elevates plain speaking to an art form. “In fact, as my wife will tell you, I hate vacations because what’s going through my head is someone’s getting ahead of me.”
Clearly this level of commitment is not for everyone and even for those who possess it, is surely a double-edged sword. “The beauty of it [coaching] is that it’s not a nine-to-five job, and the curse of it is it’s not a nine-to-five job,” says Steffen, who also used to coach division one college soccer in the US and once had a year where he was away from home for 49 weekends on recruiting trips, a workload that hastened his transition from coaching into academia.
Dr Will Vickery, a senior advisor in coaching at the Australian Sports Commission, confirms that work- life balance is an alien concept to a majority of coaches. “It consumes your life, so you don’t really have a lot of time to switch off,” he says. “You forget the fact that it’s your job as opposed to your life.”
GOORJIAN KNEW HE MIGHT FACE a little extra heat when he stepped off the plane from Japan after the Boomers’ lacklustre FIBA World Cup campaign back in September. He expected it from the traditional media, who he has long courted and enjoyed a fruitful, symbiotic relationship with. But these days, of course, the real criticism, the stuff that might keep you up at night, doesn’t come from those who report on sports for a living. It’s from the anonymous keyboard combatants on social media. Fortunately, or perhaps astutely, Goorjian isn’t on social media. “My daughter’s like, ‘Don’t worry about what they’re saying’, so I’m like, Jesus, it must be fucking horrible.” Goorjian didn’t care to find out. “I’m oblivious.”
But he’s all too aware how such criticism affects the younger coaches he mentors, calling trolling the work of “cowards with no responsibility”. “Man, you’ve got to watch your mental health because some of that stuff is vile, really nasty,” he says. “I had a guy on the phone the other night and he was like, ‘They’re talking about my wife and my kid’. It breaks my heart.”
Cheika too, shuns social media but is similarly aware of its psyche-shredding potential. “All of a sudden you can be receiving everybody’s judgment,” he says. “It’s probably more in the domain of those who are just starting off in coaching. Whereas a coach my age, I wouldn’t know what anyone’s saying on social media. So it has no effect. And this is the thing, right? It’s a choice.”
While Cheika and Goorjian’s absence from social media removes it as a stressor, they don’t shy away from scrutiny from the mainstream media and are accepting of the fact that reporters, like them, have a job to do. “I always look at it like I’m getting rewarded for my work,” says Goorjian. “People say, ‘You can’t hide this’. I like that. I’m proud of what I’m doing, I’m proud of my team. I love that if I lose a certain number of games, my ass deserves to be in the firing line. It helps drive me.”
Cheika too, is not overly bothered by criticism of his performance; invariably, he’s already judged it for himself. “I’m an extremely harsh auto critic,” he says. “What role have I played and how has my performance been? I’m already asking those questions before any media ask me. I feel like the whole pressure thing is a bit overplayed.”
Of course, pressure also comes from within an organisation, particularly if you’re a coach who’s been brought in to help a team take the final step toward a championship, premiership or medal. Goorjian admits that his outstanding record as an NBL coach, including a three-peat with the Sydney Kings, has created expectations he’s found tough to deal with. “You can’t help but feel it within the organisation and to be truthful with you, that’s why I’ve coached overseas [in China] a lot in the last 15 years,” he says. “You don’t want to let people down.”
The perception created by a team’s position on the ladder can see pressure on a coach mount quickly. “Their win-loss record is their litmus test,” says Vickery. “If they’re not winning, then they’re almost seen as failing, which is absolutely not the case. But the public perception is often that way.”
Steffen, meanwhile, believes the focus on results warps perceptions around the job the coach is actually doing. “I think coaches get too much blame when they lose, but they also get too much credit when they win,” he says.
The fact is, when a team is underperforming, it’s not the star player who’s going to get the axe, even if fault lies within the locker room. “It’s easier to get rid of the coach,” says Steffen. “To sack one person versus sacking an entire team. It’s just easier to change it that way.”
In such a transparent, results-driven profession, job security will always be an issue, says Josh Frost, a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Orygen Institute, who is currently completing his PhD on the mental health of elite coaches. “In last year’s Premier League season in the UK, 13 out of the 20 football clubs sacked or fired a coach. In some sports coach turnover is very prevalent.”
“It consumes your LIFE, so you don’t switch off. You forget that it’s your JOB as opposed to your life.”
Not surprisingly, those who’ve been in coaching for a while have developed strategies to deal with the precarious nature of their position. Cheika, for example, came into coaching from a successful business career and was already financially secure. “No one is forcing you to do this,” he says. “It’s a choice. I’ve always had my own businesses. What that does for you is give you that autonomy so you don’t make compromises for the reason of job security or because you need that salary to pay your mortgage.”
Earlier in his career, Goorjian, too, leaned on a teaching qualification as a form of insurance, allowing him not only to shelve worry about his financial future but also to take risks. “I always had a plan B,” he says. “I taught when I came to Australia. So, I had a mindset of, I’m in a casino, I’ve got five grand in my pocket that I’ve won,I’ve got the other 500 sitting on the table and I’m playing with the bank’s money. Risk-taking is a very important part of coaching. You’ve got to play a little bit by the seat of your pants.”
AS A FORMER PLAYER WITH THE Melbourne Demons in the AFL, Alistair Nicholson remembers his first coach, Neil Balme, being fired after a string of losses in 1997. “I got quite a strong dose of the instability and impact that can have on a football club and player group,” says Nicholson, who these days is the CEO of the AFL Coaches Association. “And then my time under Neale Daniher, there were times where I’d go, ‘You’re looking after us and looking after us well, but who’s looking after you?’ And I think that’s probably where the conversation is now.”
A 2020 study by the Orygen Institute conducted in partnership with the Australian Institute of Sport of 252 elite coaches found that 41 per cent of them had psychological symptoms that warranted treatment from a health professional, while 42 per cent reported potentially risky alcohol consumption. Almost a fifth (18 per cent) reported moderate to severe sleep disturbance and 14 per cent experienced very high psychological distress.
Frost believes the broad remit of modern coaching makes it inherently mentally demanding. He cites pressure from clubs, fan expectation, job insecurity and social media as contributing factors, which are compounded by long hours and frequent travel, often robbing coaches of the ability to access a support network. “I think a range of things can be very demanding and with a lot of social isolation and travelling, not having your social support around you can really contribute towards being more vulnerable to mental health challenges,” he says.
And while the argument can be made that adversity forges resilience in the longer term, the fact is, not all coaches are equipped to deal with the pressures of the job as well as others. This is only exacerbated by the fact that those who are struggling may not feel comfortable disclosing their difficulties due to concerns about the reaction from their organisations. “Coaches are leaders in their environment and might feel less inclined to exhibit or express emotions at the risk of receiving judgment from players or members of the hierarchy or board,” says Frost. “And that’s why it’s really important that organisations cultivate a psychologically safe culture to allow coaches to be able to express their emotions or challenges in an environment that has fewer consequences.”
Steffen returns to the sink-or-swim dynamic of coaching. “Sinking could lead to problems with mental health or you just get out of coaching,” he says. “I know a number of coaches that have just left coaching because of the demands. They felt like it wasn’t healthy.”
Sometimes coaches just need to refresh themselves, something often only afforded by default after contract termination. Increasingly, though, at least in the AFL, some coaches are choosing to take time off on their terms. “We’ve seen in the AFL some experienced coaches take a sabbatical or time -out and the boards have confidence that they’re going to bring something back to the club. Clarko [Alastair Clarkson] and Brad Scott and Ross Lyon came back after a period away and hopefully their energy levels will continue to let them do it because there’re only so many people that can do it at the top level, and do it well,” says Nicholson, whose organisation helped found, in 2018, a mental health education programme
for AFL community coaches and players called ‘Tackle Your Feelings’. Not surprisingly, the mental toll of the profession is something coaches will often only acknowledge behind closed doors, sometimes with other coaches who are equipped to understand the struggles they might face. Goorjian and Cheika both talk regularly to other national- level coaches. Both also see the advantages to be gained in seeking outside counsel. When Goorjian began coaching he employed a performance coaching consultant to evaluate him on and off the court. “Once a week, it’s like I’m sitting in the chair and he would say, ‘Let’s talk about you. You look tired, let’s talk about your...’ so I know that side of it.”
Similarly, after the World Cup, the 70-year-old sat down with a circle of trusted confidantes. “They knew I was going to call. They’ve watched every game. So it’s like let’s sit down and talk. If I have a problem and it’s affecting me, I have people I can go there with. You need it just like the players need it. You need to be evaluated. I’m like everybody else. I’m not made of steel.”
IF COACHING AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL does ultimately come down to winning and losing, you have to wonder how coaches mentally approach this inescapable, sometimes oppressive dynamic. While there is something to be said for attempting to embody Kipling’s immortal line, "If you can meet with triumph and disaster... And treat those two impostors just the same", coaches do have to allow for their own humanity.
“I think coaches get too much BLAME when they LOSE and too much CREDIT when they win.”
“On wins and losses, I have a rule where at midnight, that game is in the rear-view mirror,” says Goorjian. “If we win, I’ve got to celebrate with my staff, ‘Let’s have a meal together’. But at midnight I put it in the rear view mirror and it’s the same thing with a bad loss.”
Of course, the really big victories, the championships or Olympic medals should be savoured, he adds. “I got a three-peat with the Sydney Kings. You carry those rings around in your heart with that group for the rest of your lives. The bronze medal [at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics], I think about that every single day. I wake up and that’s something I carry. It never goes away.”
Cheika, who’s coming off a fourth- place finish with Argentina at the Rugby World Cup, is in a period of reflection when I speak to him. “Look, it’s hard for me because many would say we had a successful World Cup, finishing fourth. I’m still going through the last game where we could have finished third. What could I have done better in the lead-up? Not because I’m looking to be hard on myself but because I know that will serve me so that when that scenario or something similar occurs again, I’ll be able to make good decisions or better ones.”
That is, of course, all you can do, for soon enough victory and defeat are reduced to something altogether less august: statistics. And those, well, those can be damning, even for the most successful of coaches. “If the only time you’re happy is when you win the championship, you’re going to have a horrible career,” says Goorjian. “I’ve been in this close to 40 years; I’ve won six. It’s very, very rare that you finish a season with a win.”
This all serves to underline the fact that in this business, you need a healthy relationship with failure. Sport’s great conceit is that results mean everything and nothing. The stakes are a construct, the drama confected. “The greatest thing about sports is failure because it doesn’t matter if you fail,” says Dorrance. It’s a lesson he tells his players but one that might serve anyone compelled to embark on coaching as a career. “If you want to really grow, fail as often as you can and recover, because it’s in the failure that you’re going to learn about who the hell you are and you get to make a decision on who the hell you want to be.” Well said, coach.
Originally published on Esquire AUS
adidas doesn't get as much credit as it should with its running shoes. I mean, sure they were name-dropped by Run DMC but adidas are pretty good in the innovation department. The company came up with 4D printing as well as the Boost midsole tech... now that latter was a game changer. A reactive bouncy foam that returns energy with each stride? It scored higher than EVA (ethylene vinyl-acetate) soles. The Boost tech is made from TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane), which, like the EVA, does the whole cushioning, superior durability look but it also has a "high abrasion resistance".
So, we tried the adidas Supernova, a model that's made as an entry-level trainers for beginner runners. With a padded mesh upper, it has the Dreamstrike+ midsoles and other similar support rods. There's a considerable stack height. The best part of this was its Solution feature, which offers added longitudinal stability. So you've got your comfort with the Dreamstrike+ and then stability with the Solution.
Here's how good the Supernova Solution was: We started running and easily cleared three kilometres; each impact of my footfalls resulted in a "snap". Then, sensing little-to-no fatigue in the lower extremities, we decided to continue another 10km. I was able to maintain my running gait for much longer. At five kilometres, my speed has slowed but my feet were so cushioned that it never occured to me to stop.
Overall, the Supernova Solution is muy bueno. And considering that it's made out of recycled materials, this is not too shabby.
Urban life. While that promises living comforts, urban living can stifle the body and souls. You need to step out, "touch grass" as they say. every step counts. HOKA, the titan in performance footwear rewrites the playbook with the release of their latest lifestyle marvel: the Kawana 2. Not just another pair of running shoes, these are a statement on the track. What you have on your feet is a fusion of form and function that necessitates into the tapestry of daily movement.
In your navigation of the streets, seamlessly transition from pavement to studio; work to play; that's where the Kawana 2 shines brightest. Aside from its design, it's all down to the nitty-grittiness of its construction. There's the enhanced foot lockdown and cushioned comfort; and the Kawana 2 is engineered for the dynamic demands of urban life.
Find the Kawana 2 at HOKA's latest pop-up at Foot Locker Orchard. From now until 25 April, immerse yourself in a diverse range of footwear, from signature running shoes to everyday essentials like, I mean, since we're on the topic, the Kawana 2.
And the best part? Not only do you walk away with your own HOKA shoes, you get to receive a complimentary tote bag that you can personalise.
When you are racing across open waters at speeds closing in on 50 knots (which is just under 100kmh), you feel the crest of every wave as your vessel cuts through it. It is rough, as though the sea resents the intrusion and is ferociously trying to throw you off. By you, we mean anyone aboard the speedboat. If you are not strapped into a seat or holding on for dear life, you are likely to get lifted off your feet and dumped overboard. Holding on is exactly what I am doing as the Luna Rossa attempts to demonstrate the speeds that its foiling monohull can achieve.
Of course, the Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli team tells us that experiencing stomach-churning speeds on a powered vessel cannot really compare with what it feels like to sail aboard a foiling monohull. For one thing, even at the speeds we manage here off the coast of Cagliari, Italy, we would still be trailing behind the AC75 racing yacht that Luna Rossa will be fielding in the 37th America’s Cup 2024. Yes, speedboats can be outpaced by five-tonne sailing yachts, and—for some context—that is like saying a mechanical watch could be more precise than a quartz watch. This, of course, is a segue because we are here at the Luna Rossa base in Sardinia at the invitation of Panerai; the Swiss Made Italian watch brand is an official Luna Rossa sponsor.
Now, before you go accusing us of having too much Franciacorta—not to mince words about it—besides having our brains baked by the Sardinian sun, you should know that the AC75 monohulls have been known to achieve speeds in excess of 50 knots. Google it. In any case, the America’s Cup represents peak sailing, both from the perspective of sailing the monohulls and engineering them.
The legendary regatta is the Formula One of the sailing world and has been since before the motorcar was even a gleam in Karl Benz’s eye. Like the development of the automobile, the America’s Cup has quite a rich narrative and so we give it its own section. While the contemporary reality of sailing is far removed from its roots, some context is still useful. Just so you know, the America’s Cup is the world’s oldest sporting competition of any kind, with the first having taken place in 1851.
If you are in the mood to have your mind boggled by some sailing yacht facts, here's the low-down on the standard monohull hydrofoil that will be used in the coming America’s Cup. The AC75 (or America’s Cup 75 footer) is also the basis of the prototype that Luna Rossa is using, but more on that in due course. It helps to first know what in the world a hydrofoil monohull sailing yacht is, and how it manages to just glide above the waves.
The simple answer is that there are wings called hydrofoils attached to the hull, left and right, and these do what wings normally do. The tips or ends of these two wings and a rudder are the only elements that are in contact with the water when the yacht is at speed. Which makes it look for all the world like it is flying across the waves. Such a vessel should easily move at twice the prevailing wind speed, and might even go faster. This is difficult to grasp because the yacht is wind-powered after all, but it is what happens.
Here is what we have been able to glean from official sources on the technical details. The aforementioned wings are canting ballasted T-wing hydrofoils mounted on the port and starboard topside longitudinal drums; there is a centreline T-wing rudder, and no keel (source: Wikipedia).
All of the above is certainly standard fare but the America’s Cup race did not start using the hydrofoil design until 2017, and the monohull variant dates from just two years ago (2021). Team Luna Rossa itself is working on a new prototype, the LEQ 12, with the following publicly declared specifications:
This puts the LEQ 12 at an apparent disadvantage as far as top speeds go, because the AC75 has been clocked at speeds beyond 50 knots. But then of course, that is straight line speed, and the thing about sailing boats is the way they turn. Again, perhaps counterintuitively, sailing vessels can and do sail into the wind, and have been doing so since some clever sailor somewhere figured out how to angle the sails just right.
On that note, consider that the Luna Rossa team considers itself pretty clever too since it opted to create its own boat from scratch to challenge team New Zealand, the defender of the America’s Cup. The 10,000 sqm Cagliari base camp is where Luna Rossa is doing most of its development work, which is not inconsiderable. There is also a 4,000 sqm site in Barcelona, Spain, which is where the AC75 Challenger Selection Series will begin next year. In fact, Luna Rossa was one of the teams that developed the aforementioned AC75 foiling monohull standard.
Given that it predates the first Olympic Games by 45 years, the America’s Cup (also known as Auld Mug) is really the world’s oldest international sporting event. The first race was held in 1851 while the Summer Olympics began in 1896. It was originally a showdown between two yacht clubs or organisations in Great Britain and the United States, and what we call the America’s Cup today is named for the schooner that won the first race in 1851, the America.
The first defence of the America’s Cup only took place in 1870, by which time the New York Yacht Club, which was the steward of the Cup, was already under one of the most famous of the competition’s rules. That the holder of the America’s Cup is obliged to defend its right to steward Auld Mug (as it was originally called) should any qualifying club issue a challenge. This remains the case to this day. That is why the America’s Cup champion is called the Defender, while its rival is called the Challenger of Record. Until 1967, there was only one Challenger but from 1970, multiple clubs issued qualifying challenges. This was the beginning of the Challenger Selection Series. For this leg, all America’s Cup challengers competed until a victor emerged as the Challenger of Record to take on the Defender.
The race between the Challenger and Defender has evolved over time too, but the affair is still relatively stately, with the Defender and Challenger agreeing to terms prior to every challenge.
Watch collectors will be more familiar with Panerai as the military secret that equipped Italian navy divers with precision instruments than anything else. The contemporary Panerai watchmaking brand has been associated with all manner of marine activities for the better part of this century. Since 2017, Panerai has created wristwatches with the sorts of materials that America’s Cup teams were experimenting with. One might even say that Panerai’s penchant for material innovation makes it an ideal partner for a racing team such as Luna Rossa, which is precisely how team Luna Rossa describes the watchmaker.
Of course, Panerai recognises its own virtues in exploring new frontiers in watchmaking, as Ficarelli told us, citing just the example of PAM01039. The brand knows to maximise on the emotional qualities of being innovative, which points to a certain spirit of boldness. Here, we enter the realm of character. As Panerai connects the dots between past and present, it hopes to build bridges with a community of watch lovers. “Storytelling is pivotal in cementing Panerai’s legitimacy, intertwining its deep-seated maritime roots with its modern identity,” said Ficarelli. “By chronicling its journey from creating robust instruments for the Italian Navy to embracing the adrenaline of performance boating, Panerai underscores its heritage and authenticity. Each watch, steeped in historical value and innovative prowess, symbolises a continuity of tradition and a forward-looking vision, fortifying the brand’s connection with enthusiasts who value both the legacy and the ongoing maritime saga.”
Panerai had a dedicated Luna Rossa series of watches that span a number of ranges. This includes the Submersible (although the 1309 is currently unavailable). Panerai watches are typically in-demand so the availability of Luna Rossa watches should be monitored closely. Currently, our pick includes the Luminor Luna Rossa Chrono Carbotech PAM01519 and the Luminor Luna Rossa Quaranta BiTempo PAM01404. The impressively named latter watch is especially notable for its automatic P.900 GMT calibre, which has a three-day power reserve. The chronograph is powered by calibre P.9200 and is currently the only available Luna Rossa watch cases in Carbotech. This is important for this watch because it is a 44mm whopper. The GMT model is a more reasonable 40mm watch in steel. There are also two Luminor Due references worth taking note of: PAM 01378 and PAM 01381.
Just as Formula One is an expensive sport, so too is the business of the America’s Cup. It's estimated that operating the teams running up to US$200 million for each competitive run. This is evident in the Luna Rossa base camp. There are at least two simulators, two prototypes (a slightly scaled-down model that we saw and another full-size model that takes to the waves), in-house manufacturing capabilities and engineers and technicians of many stripes all working together to develop the LEQ 12 that will eventually be the Luna Rossa racing yacht. In total, there are approximately 118 people on the distinctly Italian team. That includes the Skipper and Team Director Max Sirena and Circolo Della Vela Sicilia President Patrizio Bertelli.
If there is one Panerai watch that embodies the story here, it must be the Submersible Luna Rossa PAM01039. Panerai chief marketing officer Alessandro Ficarelli explains: “(The watch) stands out due to its use of innovative materials like Carbotech (a specially developed material used by the brand), representing the brand’s adventurous spirit and its watchmaking expertise. Moreover, its aesthetic intertwines sporty resilience with elegance, including details like the incorporation of actual sail material, which symbolises a forward-thinking vision that aligns with Panerai’s maritime legacy and its future aspirations.”
Those aspirations are on show on this visit to Sardinia, which was actually part of Panerai’s now-famous experiences. The Luna Rossa vessel itself might be a very expensive closely-held secret that amateurs have no business messing with. Although there are all manner of maritime activities that can be associated with the competitive team’s preparations. Popular on this particular occasion was water-skiing. But Panerai also went the distance with a surfing experience with the brand’s ambassador, surfing champion Leonardo Fioravanti. Of course, everything will pay off nicely for Panerai should Luna Rossa be on top form during the America’s Cup. First though, whether the Luna Rossa team will become the Challenger of Record in 2024. That will be determined when the season begins in Barcelona.
Photographs courtesy of Panerai and Luna Rossa
You're going to be seeing a lot more sports-driven capsule collections by luxury brands leading up to the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games—at least by those under the LVMH umbrella of brands. The French luxury conglomerate headed by the second (at the time of writing) wealthiest man in the world has signed on as a Premium Partner of the Paris 2024 Games.
"This unprecedented partnership with the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games will contribute to heightening the appeal of France around the world. It was only natural that LVMH and its maisons be part of this exceptional international event. The values of passion, excellence and inclusion championed by high-level sports are cultivated each day by our teams, motivated by an unwavering desire to surpass limits. Sports is a tremendous source of inspiration for our maisons, which will unite creative excellence and athletic performance by contributing their savoir-faire and bold innovation to this extraordinary celebration," says LVMH chairman and chief executive officer Bernard Arnault.
The deal means that LVMH and its groups of luxury brands—across fashion, jewellery, cosmetics, and wine and spirits—will partake in key moments throughout the Games.
Parisian jeweller Chaumet is tasked with crafting the Games' medals that will be received by athletes who have proven their mettle and skills in each event. LVMH's drinks division with Möet Hennessy wines and spirits will take charge of the hospitality elements for guests as well as athletes. During the Olympic Torch Relay, Sephora is set to organise activations for the public at stops as well as key locations along the route.
On the fashion front, Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Berluti are set to announce their activations that will be scheduled all the way till the opening ceremony of Paris 2024. While little is known about the exact plans, it's been reported by multiple media sources that there's the possibility that the brands will be sponsoring uniforms. What LVMH has announced in its official press release is the 'Artisans of All Victories' principle that will guide the group's decision to support individual athletes too. The first is Léon Marchand—the 21-year-old who is France's leading hope for a medal in swimming.
As Premium Partner, LVMH is also dedicated to not only support professional athletes but also prospective ones. The group will partner French non-profit organisation Secours populaire français in support of a program to facilitate access to sports for underprivileged youths aged between 4 to 25. The aid will include funding for sports association memberships, training programs and beginner classes.
LVMH is by no means a stranger to the sports arena, especially in relation to its luxury fashion maisons. Louis Vuitton, for example, has continuously partnered up with big-named sporting events the likes of the Rugby World Cup, Davis Cup, Formula 1 Grand Prix de Monaco, as well as the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The maison also most recently signed tennis player Carlos Alcazar as its house ambassador, days before he became a Wimbledon champion.
The Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games will mark LVMH's biggest sporting event partnership yet. Not only will they be watched by an estimate of over 13 million spectators and 4 billion television viewers worldwide, it will also be the first time that the Games are hosted by Paris in 100 years.
