7ft 4in and still growing, Brandon the jolly teen giant
STANDING at 7ft 4in, the world’s tallest teenager was always going to be a slam dunk choice for a basketball team.
Brandon Marshall, 16, has proved he has the talent to match his physique after being chosen to play for the Welsh national basketball team.
But his height does have its drawbacks. He’s been sleeping diagonally in a king size bed, soon to be replaced by a £1,000 custom-made bed that will be 8ft long. He has a monster appetite, consuming 8,000 calories a day and his mother Lynne Quelch, 49, who is Welsh, described buying shoes for his size 17 feet and clothes for him as ‘horrific’.
‘It’s crazy walking down the road with Brandon,’ she said. ‘People ask for photos with him. He is so shy as well. He says “Oh, here we go again. Yes, I am tall”.’ Brandon, from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, is completing his GCSEs and is looking for basketball academies so he can study A-levels. Both his mother and father are tall and geneticists at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge say he is missing chromosome 12, known as the height cropper chromosome. He appears to have taken the world record for tallest teen after the previous holder, Broc Brown in the US, who is 7ft 8in, turned 20.