While his older brother will lead the Australian pace attack at the cricket World Cup, high jumper Brandon Starc aims to reach new heights of his own.
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The 21-year-old, four years younger than left-arm fast bowler Mitchell, will have his first crack at reaching the world championships qualifying standard at the Canberra Track Classic at the AIS Athletics Track on Saturday.
Starc needs to at least match his personal best of 2.28 metres, set in 2013, to punch his ticket to the world championships in Beijing from August 22 to August 30.
After a disappointing performance at last year's Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, where he finished eighth in the final with a height of 2.21m, Starc spent two weeks at the end of last year training in Finland with Russian star Aleksey Dmitrik.
Starc was at the SCG to see Mitchell take four wickets against England in the one-day international tri-series in January but admits whether he can attend any World Cup games will depend on his own busy schedule.
"He's been going great, he deserves it," Brandon said. "It's always good to see him doing well, and it gives me that little motivation to do well.
"Other people would say [we're similar] but I would say there are things that we do alike, but hey, we're brothers."
Brandon is 1.88m, nine centimetres shorter than Mitchell.
"Our family's quite sporty, we all did a lot of sports when we were young," Brandon said.
"I played a bit of cricket, Mitchell did a bit of Little Athletics. As we got older, our skills in our certain sports stood out and it was for the good."
Starc became the first Australian since 1992 Olympic Games bronze medallist Tim Forsyth to compete at a major championships when he qualified for the 2013 world titles.
He set his personal best of 2.28m that year at an event in Japan but couldn't reproduce that form in Glasgow last year.
"I'd be lying if I said I was happy," he said. "I think I put it down to my run-up; my run-up wasn't really good, we kind of tweaked it the week before I left Australia.
"I did expect something more than what I did jump but I made the final, so I was happy to make the final, but there could have been a little bit more there. I'm hungry for more."
Starc will return to Canberra for the ACT championships on February 21, with the Sydney Track Classic and the national championships in Brisbane in March in his sights on the road to next year's Olympic Games.
"Hopefully if it goes to plan this year, I will jump maybe a PB and if I continue that into next year it will put me into a good position to qualify for the Olympics," he said.
