Page 20 - SHARP Summer 2024

20 SUMMER 2024
SHARPMAGAZINE.COM
LETTER
GOOD SPORT
S UMMER, THANKFULLY, MEANS SUN. IT MEANS WARMER WEATHER,
wafts of hickory barbecue smoke, and weekends spent in the countryside. It also means your spring-cleaning sprees should be coming to an end. But, before you finish sprucing and sorting — and perhaps throw away something you might come to regret — I’m going to let you in on a little-known SHARP secret.
If you keep your past issues (and you should, as nothing marks out a thoroughly modern man like a magazine collection), dig out every edition from the past year and look at the covers. You’ll spy some curious phrases, from “Flip the Script” and “Holy Smokes!” to “Easy Speak” and “Full Circle”. For this issue, it’s “Game Set Match”. But what do they mean? They are, as the more quick-witted and spirit-minded amongst you may have already discerned, whiskey cocktails. Or, as I described them in my very first editor’s letter, using a very British term, “sharpeners.”
They’ve been my subtle suggestions to our readers; easy-drinking Easter eggs intended to broaden your home-bar horizons. They’re also as disparate and distinct as the features we’ve shaken, stirred, and strained into this summer edition of SHARP. And the Game Set Match (a maraschino-garnished coupe of bourbon, bitters, and artichoke liqueur) is a suitably sporting choice for this issue. For, competing within the pages to come, you’ll find racquet-swinging stories from Roger Federer, a style shoot featuring the somersaulting stylings of Canadian gymnast Félix Dolci, and a peek behind the scenes of the Paris Olympics with Omega. We’ve interviewed Tiger Woods’s former agent, and even slipped behind the wheel of the new Range Rover Sport SV. It’s a sport-a-palooza! A festival of fitness! A treasure trove of training and iron-willed workouts!
And that’s before we even come to our cover star, Chris Hemsworth, for whom wellness is something of a religion. The Australian actor has never played a professional athlete on film, but he’s got the physique and — more importantly — the discipline to pull it off, or indeed, compete for real. “I do attribute a lot of my work ethic to my athletic background,” says the star in our free-wheeling, free-spirited interview, which flits between the physicality of stunt work, his history of boxing, and Centr, the fitness app he founded in 2019.
He’s the perfect candidate to kick off a seriously sporting summer. But this is also the perfect issue with which I bow out. For, after a splendid year of car-testing, whiskey-tasting, interviewing, and organizing, I’m crossing my own SHARP finish line and moving back to Britain. I’ve had a tremendous time with the team here, and hope heartily that I’ve left a good mark on the magazine. So do try to rustle up a Game Set Match this weekend (or indeed any of the other cocktails I’ve snuck by you in the last five issues), and raise a glass to the year that was, to the sanctuary of summer and, most importantly, of course, to SHARP.
— JONATHAN WELLS
Managing Editor
SUIT AND SHIRT BY BOSS