Carl Myerscough (GBR) (© Getty Images)
Carl Myerscough could walk taller than any athlete ever to climb to the top step of the World Championship podium, but he is unable to stand upright in his own kitchen. At 2.09 metres (6ft 101/2ins), the British shot putter is number two in the world this year to American Kevin Toth.
Forget British luminaries such as Jonathan Edwards, Dwain Chambers, Denise Lewis or Steve Backley, none of these competitors holds a position higher on the world performance lists in their Paris event this year as Myerscough, who has trimmed down to a fighting weight of just over 21 stones.
Known variously as the ‘Incredible Bulk’, or the ‘Blackpool Tower’ after the Eiffel-style structure on the seafront near the family home in Lancashire where he grew up, the 23-year-old Myerscough is the world’s tallest track and field athlete, and has at last restored respectability to his event in the UK.
In his final meeting before the 9th IAAF World Championships in Athletics, Paris 2003 Saint-Denis, he won in London with 21.50 metres, from the Spaniard Manuel Martinez, the World and European Indoor champion who had defeated him in the European Cup this year, and Adam Nelson of USA, the reigning Olympic and World silver medallist.
Myerscough was just seven months old when Geoff Capes set the UK record in May 1980, but this year he has ended Capes’ reign, with 21.92 metres, and also smashed the UK all-comers’ record which had stood since 1974. It was set by the then World record-holder, American Al Feuerbach.
No British shot-putter has ever won a global shot medal. Capes took the Commonwealth Games, and the European indoor titles twice each, but was sixth and fifth respectively at the 1976 and 1980 Olympics. Denis Horgan won Olympic silver for Great Britain and Ireland in 1908, but Horgan was actually from County Cork, and worked as a New York policeman.
”I’m aware of my ranking,” says Myerscough, “but many of those in Paris have thrown further than me in the past, just not so far this year. They’ll be capable and will be ready on the day. My ranking does not put any more pressure on me than I put on myself. I’m ambitious, but I’m nearly a metre behind Toth, which is quite a bit.”
”The priority is still to do well in Paris. No matter the public expectation on me, the biggest expectation is in my own mind. The world record [23.12m, Randy Barnes, 1990] is one of my goals, and I believe I can get there eventually if I continue to improve. I’m 23, and maturity in this event is about 31. So I could be throwing for another 10 years.”
The 35-year-old Toth, who has moved from tenth to fifth on the all-time list this year, does not boast a championship record to match that statistic. He has never survived the US trials to go to the Olympics, and in three World Championships has been ninth, seventh, and eleventh (without recording a throw).
Myerscough will not take his eye off the 16lb ball to dream, dwarfing the shot in the palm of his vast right hand, flipping it with the familiar ease of a housewife tossing a pancake. The former potter seems of tough competitive clay, and cast in the heat of competitive fire.
When Christian Cantwell, fourth in the world this year, took the lead in the fifth round of the US Collegiate championships, Myerscough launched his UK record in the final round for victory.
”I try to avoid being in that situation,” he says, “but I like to think I'm good at responding. I’m really looking forward to Paris, because everyone is going to be there.”
He has always been a huge figure.
”I reached 6ft at 13 years and six months, and grew four inches every year from the age of six until I was 15,” he recalls. He was measured regularly against the back wall of the kitchen in the family home at Hambleton, near Blackpool.
”I was brought up on a farm, and our kitchen had a sloping roof. It was two metres at the back, so eventually I was too big for the wall. I’d to move to another part of the kitchen.”
Neither parent is particularly tall. Mum, Angela is 5ft 9ins, and dad, David, half an inch over six feet.
”But my brother, Grant, who is 20, is 6ft 4in, and all my cousins are 6ft 5in,” says Carl.
Father threw as a young man, but quit for 20 years. Now he is back winning medals in masters Shot and Discus.
”I learned to putt off a path in the garden when I was 13. Later dad laid a shot circle in a field on the farm, at the foot of the garden.”
It was Capes who advised Myerscough to accept a sports scholarship in the US, when he and his father came to his house several years ago. Capes, whose fame outside shot circles embraced the World’s Strongest Man and World Highland Games titles, was also a champion breeder of budgerigars.
This gentle and improbable pursuit for a vast bear of a man is mirrored in Myesrcough’s interest in fine art, which he is studying at the University of Nebraska. He is into life work, people and animals, and ceramics, such as fruit bowls.
”It doesn’t seem strange to me, and all my friends know what I’m like. I worked in a pottery for five years, at weekends, and in the summer. I’ve loved drawing and painting for as long as I can remember.”
Capes, who spent nearly 12 years as a police officer and the past four as a justice of the peace, advised him to go to the US, because, he says, “The training and coaching system is far superior. I told him he would get a great education, that he would break my British record, and that he’d come back here at 23, and the world would be his oyster...and here he is. I believe he will not just break the World record, he will demolish it.”
Myerscough returned last year from a two-year doping conviction, and was cleared on appeal to contest the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, where he finished third. Olympus, however, is a peak currently beyond his horizon. The British Olympic Association has rejected the same evidence, declining to lift the ban which it imposes on those who have failed anti-doping controls. Only Great Britain and Norway have such a rule. If Myerscough wishes to compete in any future Olympics he would have to succeed in challenging the ban in the courts, or seek adoption by another country. His marriage, in June, to the US Hammer champion Melissa Price, presents the option of competing for the USA.
”It’s not what I want to do, and might take five years,” he said. “I want to compete for Britain. The US would be very much a last resort. I’m looking at the legal options.”
