The AFL created a TV vacuum. Gout and Kennedy filled it

More than a million people tuned in to watch Gout Gout – sorry, the Maurie Plant Meet – on TV on Saturday night. They left knowing another name: Lachlan Kennedy.

If they didn’t know him before – and seriously, very few did – then they know him now. He is the one who upstaged the star and stole the show.

Gout Gout and Lachlan Kennedy after the 200m.Credit: Luke Hemer

No one came to watch Kennedy, not this time. On a night that brought crowds in numbers not seen for a serious domestic athletics meet – not counting the quirky Nitro Bolt-fest – they came to see Gout. But Kennedy turned up, and won the sprint double – the 100m and the 200m.

At the national championships in Perth in a fortnight, they will turn up, and tune in, for both.

Gout now has something in Australia he hasn’t had before – competition.

The wunderkind accustomed to seeing nothing but blue track had to, like the rest of the crowd and huge TV audience, train his eyes on Kennedy ahead of him and wonder if he could catch him.

Kennedy, 21, was already the fastest man in Australia, if you measure over 60m, which they do at the world indoor championships where he had just won silver. He had already this year also broken the national record over that distance.

Because of Gout, no one had paid much attention to Kennedy while he was doing all of this. There was always someone else to focus on, such as Rohan Browning, who was also there on Saturday night after an injury-affected period. (Incidentally, we should not blithely move on from Browning. Saturday night was an understated step in the right direction for the Olympic 100m semi-finalist.)

But it was the fastest man over the very short sprint who upstaged Gout over the long sprint of 200m.

Gout rightly retains the aura and intrigue because he is still only 17, and he was racing men for the first meaningful time since he made his breakout open-age mark to break Peter Norman’s 200m record in December. But Kennedy is entering his prime now.

Gout needed to lose. If you count coming second losing, which in Gout’s hyper-competitive teenage head he does. It burns. He and Kennedy are friends, but also now genuine rivals.

Gout was fuming with himself when he crossed the line. The greats are when they are bettered. He said all the right things publicly, and he meant them, but he was angry with himself that on the night when he was running in front of the biggest crowd of his short career – when he was the headline act – he fell short of the win.

It didn’t dampen the night; it made it more intriguing.

The Maurie Plant Meet on Channel Seven had a national reach of 1.21 million viewers, making it the most watched sport on free-to-air TV on Saturday and the third-highest rating program after the Seven and Nine news bulletins.

The AFL sold Saturday football to pay TV this season, ceding free-to-air TV coverage – for the whole year in Victoria and for a large part of the year in other states – on Saturdays. In large part, it’s because the league has added permanent Thursday night games – popular with TV viewers, not so popular with crowds – and that free-to-air game had to come from somewhere. But in doing so, the AFL – which likes to suck the oxygen out of every other sport – created a vacuum that athletics, uncharacteristically for a sport with a determined history of self-sabotage, filled enthusiastically and very ably.

Seven is now contemplating athletics’ unexpected ratings gains and are excited for Perth.

Gout has changed the dynamics for the sport. Seven would not have broadcast this event live were it not for Gout. Bruce McAvaney and Matt Shirvington would not have been flown in to commentate.

Now an audience of more than a million has been exposed, not only to Gout but to a golden era of Australian athletics. They saw Claudia Hollingsworth, Cam Myers, Eleanor Patterson, Matt Denny, Bree Rizzo – and if they didn’t know them before, or had forgotten after the Olympics, they were quickly reminded that Gout might be the brightest star, but he is not alone.

“The crowd here is insane, I’ve never run in Australia in front of a crowd like this before. They really fuelled me to keep going and hold ‘G-man’ off. I mean, what a race, my goal was to go out hard, and I was just trying to hold him off, and I got lucky this time,” Kennedy said.

It wasn’t luck. And it won’t be the last time he runs before a crowd like that in the stands and on TV in Australia.

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