Gout Gout: Racial profiling, a demanding coach and the pressure of expectation
On the track, sprint star Gout Gout is a global phenomenon. Off of it Australia’s best-known teenager is grappling with the impact of racial profiling, a demanding coach and an expectant public.
And now Gout Gout, starting to wind up! Here he comes! Gout Gout! Gout Gout goes past them all and the man in red … he’ll win!
It’s a greyish Good Friday here at Central Park in Stawell, Victoria, but 17-year-old Gout Gout has lit up the place with an explosion of speed and colour. He was handed a one-metre handicap for Heat 21 of the Stawell Gift – one of the world’s oldest footraces on grass – but it mattered naught: as the rest of the field wilted halfway through the 120m sprint, he was just getting started. He flicked an imaginary switch and boom! He was gone. He won the heat comfortably with the gold cross on his neck chain grasped between his teeth for the entirety of the 12.27-second journey.
Gout’s here after local businessman Sandy McGregor tossed him a $50,000 appearance fee. If you pay it, they will come – and on this day, they have come: the 6000-strong crowd is double the previous year’s attendance.
As he slows down, Gout flashes his toothy, 1000-watt smile and the gold cross, which he bites on for good luck, falls from his mouth. The crowd leans over the fence as one, slavering for any interaction with the shiny new toy of Australian sport.
He doesn’t run to them as much as bounce, slapping outstretched hands before stopping for selfies with spectators of all ages, seizing their phones and getting the best angle. He’ll do this for an hour or more, making good on the sizeable coin McGregor has slung him, yet humbled by the attention. “He’s a natural showman,” his manager, James Templeton, tells me. “The right amount of Hollywood.”
Then Gout sees her: the young woman leaning over the fence, calling him over. She has her newborn baby in her arms.
“Can you please sign my baby’s forehead?” she asks.
Her baby’s forehead?!
“Yes!” Gout laughs, recalling the story after a training session in Brisbane in late July. “Her forehead! That was pretty funny. Stawell was craaaaazy.”
So … did he?
“What?”
Sign the baby’s forehead?
“No!”
Why?
“Because it’s a baby!”
Gout didn’t reach the Stawell Gift final, finishing second in his semi-final to the event’s eventual winner, John Evans, who had a favourable handicap. The feeling among athletics experts and armchair aficionados was that organisers had handicapped their biggest drawcard out of their own event. Yet few left Stawell that Easter weekend thinking Gout had failed to live up to the hype. Gout-mania is a thing, cranking up with each race won, each record broken, each video that lights up on socials.
Fame rests easily with Gout, although he doesn’t like the word. “I prefer to call it ‘being known in the wider community’,” he says. “That’s how I explain it to my friends.”
Being known in the wider community is what happens when you’re a 17-year-old from Ipswich demolishing long-standing national records in the 200m sprint, his pet event. Being known in the wider community is what happens when your hypnotic running style draws comparisons to that of Usain Bolt, the eight-time Olympic gold medallist considered the greatest sprinter in history. Being known in the wider community is what happens when the Queensland government builds a $3.8 billion stadium at Victoria Park in Brisbane with the image of you winning Olympic gold medals in your home city in 2032 firmly in mind.
Being known in the wider community also means people want their pound of flesh. They stop and stare as you walk by. “I don’t mind it, eh?” Gout says of the attention. “It’s cool seeing all these different people, of different ages …”
“I hate it,” interjects his grouchy coach, Di Sheppard, who’s sitting next to him. She considers the public and media as the enemy. At best, they’re unnecessary distractions. “I have good peripheral vision. I can see people coming from a mile away. Incoming!”
“I can see someone walking then glancing,” Gout continues. “They realise it’s me and I can tell straight away if they want to come up or not. That’s a new skill I’ve learned with … fame.”
Gout has become quite known in the wider community since the All-Schools Athletics Championships in Brisbane last December when, in the under-18s boys’ 200m final, he shaved two-hundredths of a second off Peter Norman’s national record of 20.06 seconds set at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
But Gout-mania started months before that. Last year, LADbible – a digital news brand that describes itself as the “biggest community in the world for a social generation” – posted shaky video of Gout winning the boys’ under-18s 100m at the Queensland Athletics Championships in a personal best time of 10.29 seconds. The time didn’t matter as much as the margin. Wearing an all-black suit, he smoked the field by 10 metres. “Oh shit,” someone is heard uttering as Gout crosses the line.
“The 16-year-old prodigy might just be the next big thing in sports, as he went viral for his outstanding performance,” LADbible oozed.
The video, which has had more than two million views, was shared days before Gout competed at the World Athletics Under-20s Championships in Lima, Peru. He felt no pressure, setting a personal best time in the 200m.
Since then, his life has been a blur of training, running, winning. He has competed in Europe in front of young fans chanting his name, signed deals with Adidas that could land him millions, and done lavish photoshoots – all while squeezing in studies in his final year of high school at Ipswich Grammar.
He’ll compete at his first senior international meet at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo next month. Making the final of the 200m, against track superstars like the brash American Noah Lyles – with whom he shares a “big bro, little bro” relationship – is his goal.
Days after Gout returns, he’ll be presented to the crowd at half-time in the AFL grand final at the MCG. The AFL wanted him to run against the league’s leading speedsters, but Templeton, the experienced manager whose client list also includes 800m Olympic finalist Peter Bol, immediately denied the request.
Gout is a lovely amalgam of swagger and humility. The Brisbane-born son of South Sudanese refugees Bona and Monica, he’s a story that modern Australia can embrace. His parents arrived here in 2005 along with his older brother and sister, Mawien and Achiel. Gout and his three younger sisters, Atong, Adit and Achan, as well as his youngest brother Bol, were all born in Queensland.
Being known in the wider community, though, attracts negativity. Sport is strewn with Next Big Things who have failed to match the hype. Think basketballer Ben Simmons and tennis car crash Nick Kyrgios.
If you’re seeking self-doubt, social media is the place to go. “I am on socials, but I don’t read comments,” Gout says. “That’s life: everyone’s a prick. I just tend to see it, keep scrolling, keep on pushing.”
The nastiness might wash over him, but Sheppard, 60, is aware of the “armchair” experts who wonder if a high school coach like her is equipped to take him to the next level.
“Have you not seen the comments on social media?” she asks.
No, I have not.
“There’s a shitload!” she shrieks. “I ignore that stuff or I go insane … They don’t say it to my face. My ‘f..k off’ aura is too big.”
“For reals,” Gout says in agreement.
Does Gout have a f..k-off aura?
“Quite the opposite,” he grins.
It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning and Di Sheppard’s squad of teenage athletes shuffles into the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre in Nathan, 10km south of the Brisbane CBD. Sheppard is going back and forth from her car to the running track, carrying gear and starting blocks. Her mop of grey hair sprouts from her signature visor, and it bounces up and down as she prepares for the morning’s session.
She doesn’t shuffle as much as limp, the result of an accident years ago when a car collided with the motorbike on which she was a passenger. She takes a gulp of her large McCafé coffee before spotting a small group of her athletes gas-bagging. “What are you waiting for, a bus?” Sheppard barks. “We’re here for a good time, not a long time.”
Gout is among the last to arrive, but it’s no rock star entrance. Wearing black tracksuit pants, a beige hoodie and a black cap pulled low over his eyes, he looks no different to the other teenagers in the squad. If anything, he’s smaller and more unassuming than I’d imagined.
“We don’t treat him any different to anyone else,” Sheppard says. “I wouldn’t tolerate that because I don’t tolerate ‘big-head syndrome’. I know it’s crass, but we all sit down to shit, no matter what level in the world we’re at.”
Sheppard joined the track-and-field program at Ipswich Grammar in 2003. She has coached countless athletes, including Joseph Deng, who has twice set a new Australian record in the 800m. She doesn’t rely on data; she coaches on feel. She doesn’t lock into rigid programs, but coaches according to what she sees in the warm-up. Her mantra: “I don’t coach parents.” In other words, she wants mum and dad to stand back and let her do her thing. “I’ve never advertised,” she says. “It’s mostly come out of school and people hearing about me.”
While proudly self-taught, she will take advice from others, including former sprinter and bobsledder Kevin Tyler, now the president of Altis, a high-performance coaching business in the US. “He reached out to me,” Sheppard says. “It wasn’t to coach Gout. Altis had been watching me and Gout for 12 months and he said, ‘I don’t know if you know what’s coming your way with the athlete you’ve developed’.”
The Canadian’s name will prick a few ears in athletics circles. In 2015, Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates strongly warned Athletics Australia against appointing Tyler as head coach for the Rio Olympics because Tyler had previously trained alongside banned drug cheat Ben Johnson, and his own coach, Charlie Francis, had accused him of taking performance-enhancing drugs.
Tyler strongly denied the claims and has never failed a drug test. “He was open and front about his history,” Sheppard says. “He’s helped me with what I need to know. Who to stay away from, basically, in the world of athletics.”
At the training session, as Gout peels off layers of clothing, you quickly realise he’s different from the rest – even if he’s treated the same. He shuttles along the track with a movement that makes a thwack-thwack-thwack sound as his feet strikes the ground. “Sounds like a pogo stick, doesn’t it?” Sheppard says. “I really like that sound.”
Much has been made of Gout’s running style and how similar it is to Bolt’s: the upright position, the long stride, the front-side mechanics. (“He looks like a young me!” Bolt has previously said, although he has never reached out to Gout privately.) Gout shrugs at the comparisons to the Jamaican legend, determined to be his own man, and doesn’t note the irony when he compares his running style to “lightning”, which was Bolt’s nickname, given to him by his school coach. “Because lightning strikes really fast, you can barely see it,” Gout says. “It’s very smooth, very loud. When I soar through the air, when I run on the track, with my feet hitting the ground and flying forward, it feels like lightning.”
Bottling the lightning and turning it into something capable of setting world-class times is Sheppard’s job. When Gout came into her squad, he ran on his toes instead of the balls of his feet – a common mistake for inexperienced runners. “The less you see of the bottom of someone’s shoe, the more correct the front-side mechanics,” she explains. “It’s like riding a pushbike. You push down on the pedal to go, don’t you? No different to running.”
For Gout, though, the change has been more profound than just biomechanics. “Track has changed how I walk, the way I move, the way I think,” he says. “Everything I do.”
He needs the correct ankle flexion to make the most of his God-given superpower: his Achilles tendons.
“Mine are long,” he says.
“And strong,” Sheppard adds. “He’s a tendon kid. His perceived ‘swagger’ is just the fact that he has bounce. It’s not attitude, it’s the way he moves. He’s highly elastic. All your armchair coaches say he should get in the gym. He’s always been in the gym. You can’t expect him to be doing an adult program at this age. That’s the problem in this country: a lot of good juniors are doing adult programs, which is why they don’t make it through.
“The armchair coaches say his starts are shit, that he should be doing this and that … Well, that’s OK, we can start doing it their way when we get a man’s arse, can’t we?”
Bigger glutes will come as Gout matures into his adult body. He’s noticed his legs getting stronger with each gym session. The stronger he gets, the faster times he’ll run. “The first hundred is not my strength,” he says. “That’s where I can improve.”
After competing at Stawell, Gout and Sheppard were waiting for their flight back to Brisbane when she noticed he’d grown. Her instincts were right: he’d shot up a centimetre. A body scan in July revealed he’d grown a further three.
“He’s 183 centimetres if you include his hair,” Sheppard smiles. “More like 182.5 centimetres.”
“Not even that, bro,” Gout fires back at his coach.
“We’re going to fight about this …”
A spicier tussle comes late in the session as Gout practises his starts. Sheppard holds him on the blocks for what seems an eternity … before Gout stumbles and face-plants the track.
“Stop twitching!” she yells. “Un-twitch!”
“Bro!” Gout screams as he walks down the track in frustration, hands on hips, shaking his head.
Says Sheppard: “Suck it up, princess.”
Alfons Juck can see the future. Since 2002, he’s been the general manager of the Ostrava Golden Spike, an athletics meet held in the Czech Republic each June. “We have a tradition at our meet where we bring in up-and-coming athletes, always trying to find new names,” he says. “I saw this guy Usain Bolt was running fast times as a young sprinter. He was scheduled to run in 2004. We wrote in our program that a ‘super talent’ is coming. Then he was injured.”
By the time Bolt competed in Ostrava in 2006, he was ranked among the top five in the world in the 200m but still unknown outside of the realm of athletics. He broke Olympic champion Justin Gatlin’s meet record and won his first Olympic golds in Beijing two years later.
In July, Gout made his European debut at the same meet, in the same race. He won in 20.02 seconds, bettering his own national record.
“I don’t want to bring too many similarities to Gout because it is pressure,” Juck offers. “The biggest similarity between Gout and Bolt is their great connection with the crowd – but they’re different. In Bolt’s case, there was a lot of talent, but it wasn’t clear what should happen with him. In the case of Gout, his coach and agent are really carefully thinking the next steps. There is more careful planning around him.”
Gout won the under-23s 200m at the Diamond League meet in Monaco in July. The European campaign gave him a taste of travelling, training and competing overseas – and of the lifestyle that beckons if he stays on his current trajectory. “It was a good experience for sure,” Gout says. “It was …”
“It was fun,” Sheppard interrupts. “We made it a learning experience with no expectations.”
Most coaches feel obligated to shield their young athletes from the public and press, which likely explains Sheppard’s suspicion. It’s clear on the day I meet them that both would have preferred I wasn’t there.
When the training session is over and it’s time to retire to the nearby Sunnybank Hotel for the main interview – which Templeton has organised months in advance – the mood suddenly changes. “Let’s get this over and done with,” Sheppard says to Gout, before half-heartedly apologising when she realises I’m within earshot.
Her negativity seemed to rub off on Gout, who would rather be at a basketball match involving some of his schoolmates. Which is understandable: he’s 17.
As we munch down steak sandwiches, with a handful of Sheppard’s squad sitting with us, she answers many of his questions before Gout can respond. From my calculations, about one in three. Several times, she finishes his sentences.
It’s unnecessary because Gout, you quickly realise, is an intelligent, articulate young man who can hold his own in an interview. Templeton, who receives a dozen requests most weeks, says Gout hasn’t had any media training.
“If you asked any person if they wanted to do media, they’d probably say no,” Gout says. “It’s one of the things you have to do, as one of the stars, I guess. One of the things about being known in the wider community is that the media are interested.”
What doesn’t he like about it? “I don’t like talking about myself. The only time I talk about myself is in the media. Half the time, my friends don’t know what I’m doing. When I went to Europe, most of my friends didn’t know. I’d send them a photo and they’d say, ‘Why is it daytime there?’ Because I’m in Europe.”
As the interview goes on, and the fancy steak sangas go down, Gout and Sheppard start to thaw. What of the armchair coaches who wonder if she is the right person to take him to the promised land of Victoria Park in seven years? “I’m not going to hold him back,” she says. “If I can’t manage what we’re doing, I’ll tell him. That’s been the deal from day one.”
I ask them to explain what happened earlier at the track when Gout face-planted; when he called his coach “bro” so loud it echoed around the empty stadium.
“Well, bro tried to get me to do something new and I didn’t know what was happening and then I kind of …” Gout says.
“We don’t say ‘can’t’,” Sheppard interrupts.
“I didn’t say ‘can’t’. I said, ‘I couldn’t do it right now’.”
“It’s called low-heel recovery,” Sheppard explains, turning to me. “Because he has a tendency of trying to control the limb, he lifts the foot off the pedal [starting block] instead of bringing it straight through. If you bring your foot too high, it makes your body come up. They’re the things he has to learn about his body being in motion.”
It’s a relationship that’s working, even if others have cast doubt. “We have faith in each other,” Sheppard says. “Everything I’ve said to Gout has come to fruition. He’s heard more negatives about the path we’re on than the positives.”
Negatives? It’s hard to recall a bad word being uttered about Gout. “The media – sorry!” she says. “One bad race, it’s everywhere. They’re the things you have to get used to. I tell him, ‘Keep your circle small, your network big’. There’s a lot of give and take between us. He’s not a kid and I’m not a dictator.”
She’s more protector and, when Gout tells you about the car he drives, you appreciate why. When Michael Clarke was a young cricketer from Sydney’s west on the rise, he drove a Ferrari before ditching it for a Ford sponsorship. Tennis prodigy Bernard Tomic drove a yellow Lamborghini from which he’d flip the bird at paparazzi.
Gout drives a very sensible Hyundai i30. When I ask if it’s to avoid fans from harassing him, he lowers his eyes to the table.
“Racial profiling,” Sheppard says.
“Never been pulled over [by the police],” Gout says. “But when I’m in a shop, they [people] look at you differently. You try to block it out. I’m just used to it. I have a tolerance for it. A high tolerance.”
It’s confronting testimony from the state’s most famous teenager. There’s a well-documented spike in Queensland’s youth crime rates, and the Crisafulli Government has enacted sweeping policing laws to curb it.
Gout Gout can see the future, too. He can see all the way to the first week of August 2032. He can see himself on the start line in the 200m, in the sparkly new stadium. He can see himself doing what he’s done countless times: left foot first into the blocks, right foot second; left hand down first, right hand second.
He takes a deep breath and puts the gold cross of his necklace between his teeth …
“You are what you think,” he says. “Whatever you think, is what you become. If you play something in your mind – like winning gold at the Olympics – and that’s all you think about, it will happen. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s fake. You need to be thinking about big goals. Your mind will adjust. Go out there and send it.”
Psychology is Gout’s favourite subject at school. He’ll sit for his final exams when he returns from the world titles. “We had an assignment a few years ago based on how athletes use imagery to succeed in their sports,” he says. “I read a lot of studies and found that athletes who use imagery achieved a lot more than those who don’t. Imagery takes you a long way. If you imagine what you’re going to do, and you believe it, that’s what you’re going to do.”
Some f..k-off aura always helps. He is manifesting gold in the 100m and 200m in Brisbane, but he has only qualified for the latter at this year’s World Athletics Championships in Japan. Making the final is the target. “Anything else is a bonus,” Sheppard says. “We don’t think in times. We just train. We know when he’s getting quicker. When you start chasing times, it becomes ten times harder.”
If Gout makes the final in Tokyo, he’s likely to line up against Noah Lyles, 28, to whom he’s become close after training with him and appearing on his podcast in Florida last year. “We have a ‘big bro, little bro’ situation going on,” Gout says. “He’s a good guy. Whenever we see each other, like in Monaco, we’ll have some lunch. We don’t text much, but he likes my posts and sends me direct messages.”
Lyles might be his big bro but he’s also a ruthless competitor seeking revenge for failing to win the double at the Paris Olympics. After winning the 100m, he could only muster bronze in the 200m – and he has a point to prove in Tokyo. An example of his energy was on show at the US track championships in Oregon earlier this month when he was involved in an ugly shouting-and-shoving match with Olympic 200m silver medallist Kenny Bednarek.
But Lyles has a softer side. When Gout visited him earlier this year, he asked for some advice about the road ahead. Lyles told him to learn how to say “no” more often, and that he can’t expect his body to move like an adult – just as Sheppard said.
“And to enjoy being a kid,” Gout says. “These things come with time. Time is a gift in my hands. I have all the time in the world.”
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