At the end of his final day of high school in December, Cameron Myers cut his hair. It was done without forethought or fanfare at his friend’s house in Canberra, as one of the world’s most highly-touted teenage athletes marked the end of one chapter, and the start of another.
Cropped short, the new style has stuck, part of a personal overhaul in the past 12 months that has elevated him from schoolboy of promise to contender in the greatest era of men’s middle distance running. “Having short hair is a nice change, and almost just feels like you’re a different person,” he says.
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One month has passed since Myers returned from a US trip during which he produced an array of searing times. He broke the world under-20 mile record twice, equalled the national mile record and improved his 3000m personal best by eight seconds. It was a few weeks that re-established the 18-year-old as – aside from global phenomenon Gout Gout – Australian athletics’ teen of highest repute.
“I think maybe last year, in a way, I was a little bit too complacent, and thinking just things would happen naturally,” he says. “But now, I’m really focused on making sure that I control every single variable I can.”
Since becoming the fastest 16-year-old to run a mile in 2023, expectations around Myers have been stratospheric. But last year delivered only modest improvement, and disappointment anchored by defeat at the national championships in Adelaide in April.
Widely tipped heading into the 1500m final, Myers was positioned perfectly in second place with one lap to go just behind leader and veteran Stewart McSweyn. But just as the curly mop of hair appeared poised to strike, it was swamped in the washing machine of the final bend. “Some mistakes were made, and I didn’t get the result I was after,” Myers says.
No athlete is perfect, and errors and misjudgments punctuate every career. Unfortunately, this highly competitive race – featuring Australian mile and 1500m record-holder Olli Hoare, McSweyn, Tokyo Olympian Jye Edwards and eventual winner Adam Spencer – would determine selection for the Paris Olympics. Myers finished fifth.
“When you go into a ‘good race’, where you have some expectations, you tend to overthink those small little details and those small little moves that you can make,” Myers says. “As it turned out, that was probably costly for me, hanging around and trying to maintain that [second] position, rather than just going for something.”
Three months later in Paris, Australia’s trio of Spencer, Hoare and McSweyn performed admirably without reaching the final, won memorably by American Cole Hocker over Britain’s Josh Kerr, with Tokyo champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen in fourth. A disappointed Myers watched from home. “I would have definitely rather been there,” he says.
“Since not getting selected, I’ve been able to implement changes and just have a long, hard think and be like, ‘well, I wasn’t good enough to be in Paris, how can I make sure that that doesn’t happen again’.”
With his team including veteran coach Dick Telford and manager James Templeton, Myers has set about fine-tuning his approach. He has increased his focus on strength training, and become more vigilant over his sleep. He has integrated more altitude sessions at Perisher, and ran hundreds more hills. He has pushed himself in more so-called “threshold” training, where lactate builds up faster than the body can process it. “We’ve tried to just nail the weaknesses and how we could address these and potentially even making them my strengths,” Myers says.
But this is not news to Myers’ followers on Strava. He is one of the few elite athletes to maintain a public profile on the exercise-tracking social media platform. “It doesn’t really bother me if other people can see my training, and if competitors can see my training as well,” he says.
Myers has not yet faced the kind of social media abuse about which athletes such as Hoare have been honest. In fact, he has been known to give back as much as he gets. But he accepts the algorithms can be a distraction, and will sometimes delete apps he uses in the hours before a race to hone his preparation. “It’s really good to just be as focused as possible, and potentially social media can take away that focus,” he says.
With a long sponsorship deal locked in with Nike and a succession of world age records, Myers’ profile is growing with or without his Instagram account. In February, he rubbed shoulders with some of athletics’ biggest names including sprinter Noah Lyles and Myers’ world under-20s championship teammate Gout at a training camp in Florida.
The middle distance runner wasn’t originally planning to go, but given Gout and Myers are both in a group managed by Templeton, the Canberran was invited down from the freezing north-eastern USA where he had been training. Myers shared a house for five days with Gout – bonding over hours of Nintendo sports games – and ate food prepared by Gout’s coach Di Sheppard and Templeton, who found himself on the couch.
In addition to Lyles and Gout, present in the sprint training group were Britain’s three-time Olympic medal-winning sprinter Daryll Neita, Brazil’s two-time Olympic 400m hurdles medallist Alison dos Santos, and American coach Lance Baumann. Myers says doing laps alongside these proven performers each day was eye-opening. “Everything they did was so super perfect, they pay so much attention to detail, and I think that’s what makes them so successful,” he says.
Myers may be on an upwards trajectory, but so too is men’s middle distance running. The likes of Ingebrigtsen and Hocker are close to beating Hicham El Guerrouj’s famous 1999 world record, and the post-pandemic period has seen an explosion in the cohort of athletes recording sub-four minute miles, the traditional benchmark. New Zealander Sam Ruthe joined them last week, and he is three years younger that Myers.
Some of that talent will be on display at Saturday’s highly-anticipated Maurie Plant meet in Melbourne. The 1500m event will include Myers, Hoare, Spencer, 800m veteran Peter Bol, Ruthe as well as New Zealand’s national champion Sam Tanner.
Myers is a self-described athletics obsessive, who has grown up tracking his progress as a teenager closely. But on the cusp of adulthood, he also knows times alone can only take him so far. “It’s nice to run a fast time, but people don’t remember the people on the all-time lists that might run fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth,” he says. “You’ve got to be able to win.”
