Legendary coach hails record-breaker Cameron Myers

Teenager Cameron Myers loves to run, to win and smash world records. His coach, Dick Telford, describes Myers as ‘quite remarkable for a youngster’.

Teeanger Cameron Myers has made huge progress to set a qualifying time for the Paris Olympics.

Teenager Cameron Myers loves to run, to win and smash world records. His coach, Dick Telford, describes Myers as “quite remarkable for a youngster”.

This week Myers broke a longstanding 1500m world record for 17-year-olds and set a qualifying time for the Paris Olympics.

Four months ago at Albert Park at the Maurie Plant Meet he announced himself as a future star with his time of three minutes, 55.44 seconds, a world record for 16-year-olds.

Telford, who coached marathon world champion Rob de Castella, said Myers was a natural but had shown immense commitment to improve his times, barely missing a training session in the past two years .

“His strengths are his natural speed, dedication to training, communication about how he feels so that training can be adjusted accordingly and ability to think well tactically in races,” Telford told The Weekend Australian from Europe.

“Quite remarkable for a youngster.”

Myers, who turned 17 last month, ran a 1500m time of 3:33.26 at the Silesia Diamond League meet in a world class field.

Telford said over the past two years Myers had sliced off more than 21 seconds from his personal best.

Telford said teenagers can and do rapidly improve — he doesn’t expect his times to keep lowering on the same trajectory.

“Since joining in with the group training two years ago Cam has improved his 1500m from 3:54 in 2021 to 3:46 in 2022 to 3:33.26 in 2023,” Telford said.

“Part of that is due to age but partly due to the group training. Two others Ethan Wyatt-Smith and Connor Whiteley improved their 1500m time in the order of eight seconds in the last months as well on moving to the Canberra group. But Cam has exceeded all expectations.

“He has run I think nine personal best times in the last 10 races! And thrived on our group training … very rarely missing a session in those two years. And he loves the training and group team effect. Australian national team runners Jye Edwards and Rorey Hunter are good role models in my group.”

Telford said Myers had room for improvement but had already done a lot of hard work in fine tuning his race skills.

“A couple of obvious areas to work on with Cam stood out two years ago and no doubt that has helped,” he said. “More things to develop now so we can expect improvement to continue but obviously not at the same rate. And it is always difficult to predict how much a teenager can improve. In any case it’s important to let it happen, to facilitate it, rather than forcing it.”