Usain Bolt and Cathy Freeman have cautioned against the Gout Gout hype ahead of the teenager’s first senior World Championships
There’s a big difference between the reality and the hysteria about Gout Gout. And, two Olympic greats want the Aussie’s growing fan base to understand the enormity of what he is about to face.
The Monaco Diamond League meet is considered the jewel in the crown of the lucrative athletics circuit. A lot of that has to do with the stunning destination in the richest principality in the world as well as a track that is traditionally fast.
It’s the place where records tumble and the sport’s biggest names make sure they’re part of the action every year. Understandably it’s an important event on the calendar of world athletics boss Sebastian Coe whose diary is inevitably full mingling with royalty, business leaders and VIPs from around the globe.
They all want a piece of him. This year Coe cleared his diary for one special meeting … with a 17-year-old kid from Queensland.
Coe wanted to meet Gout Gout so the pair sat down for supper. Earlier in the evening the Australian schoolboy had shown what all the hype was about with victory in the under-20 200m.
For more than an hour the most important man in athletics dined with Gout, his coach Di Sheppard and manager James Templeton. He’d seen all the social media clips, read the results and heard about this prodigy from Down Under, but he wanted to meet the sprinter dubbed “the next Usain Bolt” for himself.
“Not only am I a Gout believer, I had supper with him in Monaco,” Coe says. “It was with him, James Templeton and his coach, who was a fascinating woman. It was a really good evening.”
The Monaco race was the second in a brief European jaunt for Gout during the July school holidays. A couple of weeks earlier he’d stepped straight off a plane and broken his Australian 200m record, running 20.02sec at the Ostrava Golden Spike meet.
It was the appetiser for this week when Gout makes his world championships debut in Tokyo, racing for the first time against reigning world champion Noah Lyles and Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo.
Gout will become the youngest male to wear the green and gold at a world championships when he lines up in the 200m heats on Wednesday night.
Such is the fascination about how he’ll go, an unprecedented two TV networks from Australia – SBS and Channel 9 – will be covering the event live. The demands have been so overwhelming from media all around the globe that Gout’s management has been forced to institute a blanket media ban.
Given he’s still doing his Year 12 studies, it was decided no press until he arrived in Japan where he will front a media call organised by his major sponsor Adidas, who won a bidding war to sign him last year on a long-term $6 million deal.
Normally the shoe company press conferences before a championship are reserved for Olympic champions and world record holders, not a kid who has only raced a couple of times at senior level.
But the Gout effect is real.
Absolutely outrageous from Gout Gout.
— Daniel Hussey (@DanielHussey2) December 6, 2024
10.04 at the age of 16.
Speechless.
pic.twitter.com/FYJbOzyMVz
The social media clips of him blitzing junior races, which have now had millions of views, started the juggernaut and it has become bigger and bigger almost every time he steps onto the track.
Breaking the 56-year-old Australian 200m record which Peter Norman set at the Mexico Olympics when he was still 16 last December captured the attention of the athletics community with Bolt even moved to say Gout looked like a younger version of himself given their strikingly similar running style.
Then at the national titles in April, Gout ran 19.84sec and broke 10 seconds for the 100m – albeit both with illegal tailwinds – to have everyone licking their lips about what he could do in Tokyo in September.
This is where it gets tricky for Gout.
The hysteria around him has the punter in the local cafe asking if he’s going to win the world title or at the very least a medal. The reality is a lot different. To get out of his heat Gout will most likely have to break his Australian record.
Then to progress through the semi-finals there would have to be another significant jump which his camp believes he’s capable of but the facts are he comes into the championships ranked 20th in the world.
Lyles, who won the Diamond League final in Zurich last month, recorded the fastest time of the year, 19.63sec, at the US trials.
Many see these championships as a free hit for Gout. While the hype is there, the realistic expectations in terms of results aren’t. He should go and enjoy his first major, be a wide-eyed 17-year-old and soak up everything about the experience for next time.
Not even Bolt, the greatest of all-time and fastest man in history over 100m and 200m, didn’t get out of his heat at his first world championships.
The goalposts are going to change quickly for Gout as his career progresses. Tokyo is the first step in a journey that will hopefully end in gold at Brisbane 2032.
He is on the same journey Cathy Freeman brilliantly navigated more than 30 years ago.
She started as a 16-year-old winning a gold medal in the 4x100m relay at the 1990 Auckland Commonwealth Games. Two years later she didn’t get out of the second round at the Barcelona Olympics.
In 1993 – the year Sydney was announced as the host of the 2000 Olympics – she made the 200m semi-finals at the world championships in Stuttgart.
Freeman says having the carrot of a hometown Olympics made Australian athletes “superhuman” and it’s no coincidence her career breakthrough came the following year when she won double gold in the 200m and 400m at the Commonwealth Games in Canada.
From there the trajectory was all up. A silver medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics was followed by world titles in 1997 and 1999 before her historic 400m gold medal in Sydney.
Gout starts his seven-year runway for Brisbane in Tokyo and Freeman is the first to call for understanding about the enormity of what he’s about to face.
“I think the world champs will test him and so it should,” Freeman says. “But he’s a very young man, he has got a bright future and a lot to look forward to, so much ahead of him.
“He is exciting and from what I can gather he has got strong support around him with his coach and his family.
“As long as he can be strong in who he is within himself and find that part of inner strength and peace within he will be able to handle it (the pressure).”
Bolt was singing a similar tune when he fronted a media conference with his long-time sponsor Puma in Tokyo on Thursday.
“If he (Gout) continues on this track, it’s going to be good, but it’s always easy when you’re younger,“ Bolt said. ”The transition to seniors from juniors is always tougher.
“It’s all about if you get the right coach, the right people around you, if you’re focused enough. So there will be a lot of factors to determine if he’s going to be great and if he’s going to continue on the same trajectory to a championship or Olympics.
“He’s very talented, with the times he’s running now, and he’s really been doing well.
“That’s something that you love to see because you want athletes to do well. The more athletes do well, the bigger the sport is, and I’m always a supporter of track and field getting bigger and doing bigger things.”
Another former world champion, 400m hurdler Jana Pittman, is convinced Gout is ready to do those bigger things.
“He reminds me so much of Usain Bolt it’s not funny. His smile, how good he is,” Pittman says. “He’s the real deal. He is as good as we’re ever going to have.”
Olympic pole vault champion Nina Kennedy, who is missing Tokyo because of injury, is excited about how Gout is shining a light on athletics in Australia.
“The men’s 100m has always been the event, we look at Usain Bolt, I could name so many 100m male athletes but could I name them in the other events? No, but that’s just our sport right?,” Kennedy says.
“He (Gout) is great and he’s doing really great things for our sport in Australia and leading into Brisbane it’s exactly what Australia needs. I’m really excited to see how he does in the next few years.”
Peter Bol lived with Gout in Germany during his brief European trip this year. The pair are both Adidas ambassadors and also share the same manager.
For Bol, who finished fourth in the 800m at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, it was an eye-opening experience to observe Gout up close.
“He is incredible to watch,” Bol says. “I got to spend quite a bit of time with him and I was looking at him saying, ‘Bro, you so look like an 800 runner but you just fly’. The way he can express power through the track is insane yet he’s about the similar weight class (to me), it’s just hard to comprehend.
“He is an impressive young man. I’m a lot older and people say, ‘What advice would you give to him?’ The only advice I could give someone like Gout is just to be himself for as long as possible.
“Because in the position that he is in, you get pulled in so many different directions and to still be able to be himself, that’s the most impressive thing.
“It’s a perfect story right, a young guy super-talented from Ipswich, how cool would it be to bring the medal home in Brisbane.”
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