Hamish Kerr will not defend his Commonwealth Games high jump title in Glasgow. New Zealand’s Olympic and world champion confirmed overnight that he has withdrawn from the men’s high jump, ending several weeks of uncertainty about whether the 29-year-old would make the start list at all.
Kerr had been due to compete in the final on Tuesday morning New Zealand time. He told RNZ in Glasgow that the decision came down to a body and a mind that had not recovered from the most successful stretch of his career.
“The start of this year, had a massive few years, felt like the body was good and ready to get training, but we realised pretty quickly I was pretty burnt out,” Kerr said.
“I’m just not quite ready and not in a position that I want to be to go out there, and do the singlet and the New Zealand team justice.”
He described it as “unfortunate to make the decision and it was one that was not made lightly”.
The withdrawal was not a complete surprise. On 14 July, Kerr posted on social media that he had stopped training altogether earlier in the year, a message reported by RNZ at the time.
“A couple of months ago, the demands of the last few seasons finally caught up with me, so I made the decision to take a break from training,” he wrote. “Since returning, I’ve been really encouraged by the progress I’m making and am feeling positive about where things are heading. I’m excited and hopeful that I’ll be back competing again soon. Thanks for all the support.”
An Athletics New Zealand spokesperson said at the time that “it is for him to make the call”. He has now made it.
What makes the absence sting is where it is happening. Glasgow is the city where Kerr’s global career began in earnest. At the Emirates Arena in March 2024 he won the world indoor title with an Oceanian record of 2.36m, his first world championship gold and the jump that turned a very good New Zealand high jumper into a genuine title contender. He returns to the same city 28 months later as the biggest name in his event and will spend the week in the stands.
The run in between is the reason he is not jumping. Since taking the Commonwealth title in Birmingham in 2022 with a clearance of 2.25m, ahead of Australia’s Brandon Starc, Kerr has won the world indoor title in Glasgow, Olympic gold in Paris in 2024 after a jump-off with the United States’ Shelby McEwen, the Diamond League final, and then the world outdoor title in Tokyo in September last year. That Tokyo win, a world-leading 2.36m that World Athletics reported edged out Korea’s Woo Sanghyeok, made him the first New Zealander to win a world championship medal in the high jump. Four global finals in under two years, each one requiring him to be at peak form on a single evening, is a punishing way to live.
His last competitive jump was at the New Zealand championships in March, where he cleared 2.28m for a tenth national title. He has not competed internationally in 2026 at all. High Performance New Zealand has supported the recovery, and Kerr has said his target now is defending his Olympic title in Los Angeles in 2028, which gives him two full seasons to rebuild.
Burnout is a word that gets used loosely in sport, often as a polite cover for something else. In this case Kerr has been unusually direct about it, and that matters. Track and field athletes at the top of the sport now face an almost unbroken calendar of indoor championships, Diamond League meetings, outdoor world championships and Olympic cycles, with an increasingly short off season in between. An athlete who wins everything is precisely the athlete asked to appear at everything. Kerr choosing to say no in public, rather than turning up and jumping 2.15m to keep sponsors and selectors happy, is a more useful message for young New Zealand athletes than another medal would have been.
It also leaves a hole in the Glasgow field. Kerr has been the man to beat in Commonwealth high jump for four years, and the event now opens up considerably for the Australian, English and Canadian jumpers who have spent that time finishing behind him.
Kerr is staying in Glasgow to support the rest of the New Zealand team, which has already banked medals in the pool through Erika Fairweather, Lewis Clareburt and Hazel Ouwehand. Athletics got under way in Glasgow on Monday, with the track programme running through to the closing weekend.
The NZ Herald also confirmed the withdrawal. For a country that has produced very few world-beating high jumpers, losing this one for a season is a real cost. Getting him back healthy for Los Angeles is worth more than a Commonwealth medal in 2026, and Kerr appears to have worked that out before anyone had to tell him.
What do you make of Kerr pulling out, and is the international athletics calendar asking too much of its best athletes? Leave a comment below and let us know.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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