After a year in which he has taken some significant strides forward, up and coming Australian star Cam Myers talks to Matt Majendie about his plans to upset to the world order in middle-distance running.

When Josh Kerr kicked for the line at the final stages of the 1500m at last month’s World Athletics Ultimate Championship, only Cam Myers was properly able to go with him. For a moment, the 20-year-old young pretender to the more established order of middle-distance running dared to believe he was destined for a victorious end to a break-out season.

“I think 200m to go, 150m, even 100m to go coming off that last bend, I really believed that I had a shot at winning,” he reflects, one month on.

In the end, Kerr had enough additional speed to hold off his challenger and, in interviews in the immediate aftermath, Myers was gracious enough to admit that he had simply lost out to a quicker athlete. There was no sign of the trash talking which has become a feature among the middle-distance men, particularly Kerr and Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

Myers is happy to let his running to the talking, and has done plenty of that over the past six months. There have been wins in Paris, Eugene, Berlin, Karlsruhe, as well as a silver at the Commonwealth Games (also finishing second to Kerr), the aforementioned Ultimate runners-up spot and victory at the Diamond League final in Brussels. It is the Ultimate which ranks as arguably the highlight of the season, having come so close to eclipsing the mile world record-holder on the season’s biggest stage.

Looking ahead to 2027, Myers is not about to shift his approach and get involved in any sort of war of words. “I genuinely have a lot of respect for each of them so it’s hard for me to really trash talk them too much,” he explains, “because I’m coming from a place where throughout my career I’ve looked up to them. Now I’ve gotten to a certain level where I’m able to compete against them so it feels weird to go and slag them off or anything. I don't think my personality really suits having the conflicts within the sport so it's nice to not be involved in that.”

But don’t mistake the respect and reverence towards his more lofted peers for any sort of admission of defeat, the Australian brimming with a Kerr/Ingebrigtsen-like confidence when it comes to competing.

He remembers first racing against Kerr back in 2023 and realising the gulf between them, finishing as he did six seconds back and feeling like he was running an entirely different race at the time.

In the intervening years, Myers has been like a sponge, soaking up every bit of information possible watching that pair and also competing against them and others around the globe.

At close quarters, he has witnessed the alternative approaches – Kerr’s of running limited races with a view to peaking at each season’s major championship or that of Ingebrigtsen, where he aspires to run every race and discipline possible.

“I’d like to look back knowing that I raced as much as possible but I want to be able to perform at the major championships, so I guess it’s kind of a balance between both of those approaches probably,” he says, still finding his way early in the senior ranks.

He has enjoyed tapping into the mindset of retired athletes like Augustine Choge and Bernard Lagat and, having shared an agent with David Rudisha, would relish the chance to speak at length with the 800m world record-holder in due course.

Myers is taking a Rudisha route of sorts – setting up his training base in Tübingen, Germany, as the Kenyan did in his heyday – although in a different house to where the Kenyan had his low-key European set-up. Myers headed there in April and was based there until just before the Ultimate, the longest stint he has been away from home, yet sharing with some of other stars of Australian athletics at different points such as Gout Gout and Peter Bol.

Back home in Australia for the off-season, it is the mental reset that has been the biggest consideration since the season’s end. Besides a slight hamstring issue during the summer, which appeared to remedy itself, the physical toll, Myers insists, has proved to be fairly limited. Instead it has been more the mental fatigue of competing on the road.

To refresh, he has turned to rock climbing and playing tennis with friends, as well as going out jogging with them, even in his off-season. The short hiatus has given him time to reflect, which begs the question of whether he has exceeded expectations over the past year.

“I have very high expectations so it was actually pretty much on par,” he says, dissecting his 2026. “I set myself a few time goals and also set myself the goal of a medal at the Commonwealth Games. I think I achieved what I initially set out to do and my expectations grew as the season went on.”

A budding striker growing up and a keen Chelsea fan – although as a sporting supporter that has shifted more to the AFL and the Melbourne Hawks – Myers quickly began to move away from playing football at all towards focusing on his athletics.

“I was in a football club and felt like if you made a mistake you kind of got abused a bit,” he says. “Not properly abused but it’d be made known you’d made a mistake, and I didn’t like that aspect. With athletics, I liked that I could just run. It’s obviously your fault when something goes wrong but you can control it a lot more.”

He started winning national championships at the age of 12, and has continued to climb the ranks both nationally and, more recently, internationally ever since. And yet for all he’s achieved in 2026 alone it still feels like he is at the beginning of what could be a remarkable career on his current trajectory. At the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, former world 1500m champion Jake Wightman described him as “the future of the sport”.

Myers is already mapping out the calendar for his 2027 season with a view to probably foregoing the indoor season and the end goal is already an eye on the World Championships in Beijing in September.

“I think I want to start with winning a medal in Beijing,” he says of next season’s targets and what would be a first. “I don’t really look at [the Ultimate in] Budapest as a championship because it doesn’t have the heats and rounds, and that’s another variable that you can’t really account for. There are always some curveballs that come out of the heats. So for next year I really want to win a gold medal but a medal in general, and I have a lot more trust in what I’m doing now.”

Beyond that lies a potential first Olympics in Los Angeles. “Longer term, LA is the target but even bigger than that is Brisbane [the subsequent Olympics in 2032],” he adds. “The goal in LA is to win a medal, and preferably a gold medal, but I’ve got six years between now and Brisbane. Hopefully by then I can be unbeatable.”

Spoken with the confidence of either a Kerr or an Ingebrigtsen.