By Len Johnson
Is it just me or is Cam Myers channelling Herb Elliott.
The notion occurred to me as I watched Myers destroy a field of seniors, but not betters, in the 3000 metres at the Zatopek meeting last December. Looking for a smooth-running teenager with what you might have described as a mini-mullet, it took a couple of laps to realise that the rangy bloke with the close-cropped hair cruising comfortably on the heels of the pacemaker was, indeed, Myers.
Seven minutes 41.11 seconds later, almost 10 metres clear of second place, it could only have been Cameron Myers.
That was the end of 2024, a year when Myers unluckily missed selection for the Paris Olympic Games. As one year closed, so did another open just as impressively. Running indoors in New York on the last weekend in January, Myers opened the Tokyo world championships year with another resounding performance – this time a world U20 indoor record 3:53.12 in the mile.
So, yes, Cam Myers is channelling Herb Elliott’s performance-wise. And, even if by mere coincidence, he’s evoking the look as well (unless my ageing eyes deceive me, a possibility I must at least acknowledge).
Myers turned 18 in June last year. Herb Elliott was on the cusp of 19 when he moved from Perth to Melbourne after the 1956 Olympic Games to train under the tutelage of Percy Cerutty. A more comprehensive picture library may contradict me, but when Herb first came to national attention in winning a junior 880 yards-one mile double at the 1955 national championships in Adelaide – over Ron Clarke in the latter, both in national junior records and then won almost every running event at his combined schools competition at the end of that same year – he had a pretty standard 1950s teenager hair-style. From pretty much the time he ran the Portsea sandhill for the first time, however, Elliott adopted a more ascetic look. Not a full crew-cut, but not much longer than that either.
By the time Elliott had broken four minutes at the start of 1958, through to winning the 880 yards-mile double at the British Empire Games in Cardiff (on top of a winning tour of the US) Elliott had become famous for both the quality of his running and his unbeaten record. My media forebears put this down to his haircut and – more broadly – what they soon dubbed his “killer instinct.”
A clip from Herb’s post-mile media conference in Cardiff illustrates the point (not to mention Elliott’s reaction to the line of questioning). As reported in The Golden Mile (Herb’s autobiography ghosted by journalist Alan Trengove), one exchange went like this:
Questioner 1: You sacrifice everything for speed?
Herb: Yeah, I suppose you could say that.
Questioner 1: You even have a crew-cut. I suppose that is to reduce wind resistance?
Herb: Oh, no. That’s because of my dandruff.
Questioner 2: I notice you’re unshaven Harb. Like a boxer.
Herb: Yeah, that’s right.
Questioner 2: Why don’t you shave on the day of the race? Is it to make you feel more aggressive, more of a killer?
Herb: Well, no – not really. It’s just that I’m such a lazy bloke. To tell you the truth, I don’t like shaving.
Far be it from me to suggest a line of questioning to my erstwhile media colleagues but might there be something in this. Just saying!
Hair-style aside, there’s not much comparison between Cameron Myers and Herb Elliott’s junior careers. Mainly, that’s because Elliott scarcely had one. There weren’t even national junior championships. The junior races in Adelaide were an add-on to the senior program, though they did carry the South Australian state titles. National junior titles for me didn’t come in until 1962-63, by which time Herb had retired. Women’s junior titles were adopted in 1957-58.
In stark contrast Myers has been racing at senior level for the past two seasons. As a 15-year-old, Myers finished third – to Peyton Craig and Patrick Cantlon – in the 1500 at the 2021-22 junior nationals. He has won a world juniors silver medal (again, unavailable to Elliott) and has already run in major Diamond League meetings including last year’s Pre Classic in Eugene. Racing against seniors at such an early age with inevitable losses means Myers cannot match Elliott’s record of being undefeated at 1500/mile throughout his career.
Who needs that pressure anyway, well may we ask.
In his indoor mile in New York, Myers took two seconds off the previous junior record – 3:55.02 by German Fernandez of the USA back in 2009. A quick glance at the all-time list will tell you that there aren’t many indoor miles run and with field sizes limited on the tighter ‘short’ tracks not many of them contain U20 athletes.
There is another Australian link in all this. German Fernandez set his world U20 record back in February 2009. He also ran the world cross-country the following month in Amman, Jordan where there was great pre-race speculation about how he – and a promising young Australian named Ryan Gregson would fare against the east Africans. The pair had already run the junior race a year earlier in Edinburgh, Fernandez finishing twenty-fifth, Gregson six places further back.
Fernandez did improve noticeably in Amman, finishing in eleventh place. Gregson also did better, finishing twenty-fourth.
Fernandez remained active through most of the 2010s without ever quite fulfilling his potential. Gregson, we know, went on to bigger things in his senior career, setting an Australian record 3:31.06 for 1500 in Monaco in 2010, becoming in Rio in 2016 the first Australian man since Graham Crouch in 1976 to reach the Olympic 1500 final and racing competitively at 1500 every year for a decade. He’s making a fair fist of the marathon, too.
Come to think of it, Ryan also sported a close-cropped ‘do’.
