After a difficult spell in the US and a slump that took him out of the sport mentally, the Scottish long jump record-holder found his form again back where it all started.

From Ullapool in the Scottish Highlands to Oklahoma in the South Central region of the United States, to Edinburgh and back to Ullapool, Stephen Mackenzie has experienced the contrasting extremes of rural and city life. 

The 24-year-old Edinburgh AC athlete, who broke Darren Ritchie’s long-standing Scottish long jump record with 8.15m in the final round of the UK Athletics Championships in Birmingham in June, has travelled thousands of miles in pursuit of the ideal set-up. In recent months he’s realised it was at home all along. 

“I always thought it would be great, coming from Ullapool, to train out in America,” reflects the British champion. “I was like: ‘If I'm already jumping 7.59m, wait ‘til I go there, I'm going to be jumping at 8.00m and all this’, but it doesn't really work out like that, does it?”

Mackenzie rose to prominence as a junior and won the England Athletics U20 title in 2019. Guided at the time by Linda Nicholson, he went on to represent Great Britain and Northern Ireland at the European U20 Championships in Sweden later that summer.

His subsequent move to the US to take up a sports scholarship at Oklahoma State University was inspired by the excellent facilities and high class competition, but a delayed departure due to Covid (and related restrictions once he arrived), together with a sharp contrast in training methods and injury, eventually led him back to Scotland.

“I wasn’t capable of training at a higher level at that point, I was just this scrawny kid,” he admits. “They actually asked me what my weekly mileage was when I was doing my medical… they thought I did 5km or something.

“They wanted me to do power cleans and stuff, and I was like: ’What is this?’. My body couldn’t really handle it and I got injured. That started a downhill cycle in terms of how I viewed the sport and mentally I just wasn't really in it for a few years.”

Mackenzie returned to his family home in May 2021. That September he transferred into the second year of a Quantity Surveying course in Edinburgh and throughout that period he was guided by Ritchie’s former coach John Scott who, he says, was ‘instrumental’ in getting him back into a good headspace. He graduated in 2025.

Now back in Ullapool and after a winter working with his home coach Brian Gordon, Mackenzie is “mentally back in the game” and consistently delivering impressive results.

“Brian would ask me why I’d been inconsistent or why I was doing certain training and I didn’t really know the answers,” he says. “He also trained me mentally to be stronger through different sessions. At the start of winter I remember him saying: ‘You’ve got to do 100 push-ups’, and I thought: ‘Alright, I'll do 20 and then take a little breather’, but no, it was 100 all the way through. It took me four months to be able to do it. And it's not because push-ups are going to make me jump 8.15m, it’s about being uncomfortable and staying with it. It’s the closest feeling to when you're in competition and someone jumps something big, so that final jump in Birmingham – that's what I'd been training for.

“There’s obviously some fundamental stuff that I have to do just to be physically able to jump those distances but, once you're there, it's all in the mind really and just trying to be consistent and execute it every single time.

“If you’re consistent, if you can show that you can jump 8.05m, 8.10m, 8.15m in every competition, you're going to be a threat. So that's my goal, just keep training, keep working through challenges, and hopefully get mentally a bit stronger so I can produce 8.15m on a day that matters.”

In addition to mental resilience and consistency, the picturesque and quiet village of Ullapool - with its understated, accessible facilities and one-to-one coaching - has also played its part. 

In Mackenzie’s case, there really is no place like home.