The numbers are stacking up for 20-year-old Cameron Myers. In Paris on Sunday night he smashed the Australian 1500m record in 3:28.00 – the fastest time in the world this year and the fastest ever run by someone under 21. He’s now 12th on the storied list of all-time 1500m times and two seconds off the world record.
Myers admitted the Australian record was one he wanted to tick off. “I think having that exterior pressure on yourself to get a time, sort of takes away from the main part of the race and that’s winning. So, yeah, clearing that up [the record], I think it’s going to be huge going forward.” He managed to take the record and win, ahead of French runner Azeddine Habz and the British 2022 world champion, Jake Wightman.
The Canberra runner’s next target is the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and an old-school mile race – the first time the distance has been run at the Games in 60 years. There he will compete against fellow Australian Olli Hoare, whose national record he just shattered.
Wightman is also due to run the mile in Glasgow. But arguably the biggest name in the mile race will behis fellow Scot Josh Kerr, the 2023 world champion and 2024 Olympic silver medallist at 1500m. They are both competing on home soil.
“I want to win and I want to put up a good fight,” Myers said in Paris. “So, even if I don’t win, I want to make sure that I make the other guys work as hard as possible.”
Whatever happens in Glasgow, Myers has put himself into the conversation for a medal at the 2028 LA Olympics.
Myers started his running journey at Belconnen Little Athletics Club when he was six years old. He told Australian Athletics that when he was 10, “I did my first cross-country nationals and I just got smashed. I finished 17th or something and I went, ‘argh, I don’t want this to happen again, I really hate losing.’”
Myers spent a large part of his childhood on the track, coached at 10 years old by Lee Bobbin and renowned sports scientist Dick Telford at 14. Bobbin told Australian Athletics: “Cameron has been lucky all his career because he has had someone better than him to chase.” Now he is becoming the runner leading and dictating races.
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Since graduating from Lake Ginninderra College in 2024 he has raced relentlessly at middle distance, competing in the 800m, 1500m and mile, 3000m and even the 5000m, winning races at each distance. In 2023 he burst on to the scene as the second-youngest person to break the four-minute-mile barrier and then a few months later clocked a 1500m at 3:33.26 – the fastest ever by an under-18 athlete.
He met the qualification standard for the 1500m at the 2024 Paris Olympics, while still a teenager, but the Australian squad was limited to three runners and he ended up fifth, losing lost out to Hoare, Stewart McSweyn and Adam Spencer. He told GQ earlier this year that his Olympic snub in 2024 “was a tough pill to swallow initially, but I think beyond that, it gave me the fire”.
Earlier this year Myers ran an 800m in 1:44.05 at the Puma Nitro Lange Laufnacht (“Long night of running”) in Karlsruhe, Germany, in a time faster than Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Cole Hocker or Josh Kerr have ever managed. His 1500m time in Paris on Sunday was 0.32 seconds faster than the time Ingebrigtsen managed as a 20-year-old to win the 1500m at the Tokyo Olympics.
Myers has been transparent in his admiration for his sporting hero Ingebrigtsen. “I love watching him win races and he looks like he does it with ease.” With the pair seemingly committing their short-term future to the 1500m it seems the boy from Canberra who grew up idolising the Olympic gold medallist may yet line up with him in a Diamond League meet as early as this month in London.