‘Wunderkind’ Gout wins plenty of friends and admirers on the big stage
Similar stories were aired and printed around the world. More than 50 journalists and photographers crammed into an Adidas media event, desperate for a piece of “the fastest kid on Earth”, as The Economist described him.
“Mr Gout’s entourage is keen to temper expectations,” the uppity British news journal wrote. “Interviews with the media have been carefully managed. The Economist was denied one.”
Team Gout doesn’t buy into the narrative that the media is loading too much expectation on his slender shoulders. The benchmarks have been set by athlete and coach as much as anyone.
His tough-as-teak coach, Di Sheppard, talks openly about expecting Gout to win gold in the 100m and 200m at the 2032 Brisbane Olympics. In February, Gout told Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles on his podcast he’s “coming” for him. “That’s what I love to hear,” Lyles replied.
When The Australian spent the day with Gout in late July, Sheppard could not have been clearer about what she expected in Tokyo: a place in the 200m final. “Anything else is a bonus,” she said as Gout nodded in agreement. “We don’t think in times. We just train. We know when he’s getting quicker. When you start chasing times, it becomes 10 times harder.”
He was chasing times in the heats and semi-final: he wanted to break the 20-second barrier, knowing he’d have to go that fast to reach the final eight.
In his heat, Gout placed third in 20.23sec, and while he was lauded for the run afterwards and said the right things to the assembled media, privately he wasn’t happy.
He felt “tight” walking into the Olympic Stadium. The tracks in Australia, even the tracks of Europe where he competed in June and July, felt vastly different to the atmosphere of his first senior international meet. In his semi-final, which included Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo, he looked more comfortable but again he couldn’t break 20sec, finishing fourth in 20.36sec and 18th overall. Gout missed the final but lost no admirers.
He was also proven right. The eighth-fastest qualifier, Zimbabwe’s Tapiwanashe Makarawu, clocked 19.98sec.
These world titles illuminated the obvious and underlined what Sheppard has been reminding us of all year: Gout is a 17-year-old still growing into his adult body. It’s reflected in the way he comes out of the starting blocks.
“The armchair coaches say his starts are shit, that he should be doing this and that,” Sheppard told The Australian last month.
“Well, that’s OK, we can start doing it their way when we get a man’s arse, can’t we?”
Gout might be a boy among men now, but his peers have already welcomed him as one of their own. He’s hung out with Lyles, socialised with pole vault king Mondo Duplantis, and been the talk of the meet – not just among the media but fellow competitors as well.
They all think he’s wunderbar.
Cathy’s glory days
This time a quarter of a century ago, we were having the time of our wretched lives at the Sydney Olympics. So many memories, none of which I can remember, just that it was a lot of fun.
Cathy Freeman was the star then and remains so now after she was inducted into the inaugural Stadium Australia Hall of Fame on Monday alongside nine sporting icons including swimmer Ian Thorpe, former Wallabies captain John Eales, Socceroos legend John Aloisi, and Paralympic champion Louise Sauvage.
Rugby league inductee Andrew Johns was so nervous about meeting Freeman that his yoga guru wife, Kate Kendall, made him do breathing exercises on the drive out to Sydney Olympic Park.
When Freeman was interviewed on stage, she explained how the crowd inspired her to victory in the 400m. “They lifted me off the ground,” she said.
The image of the space-suited Freeman lighting up that sparkly Sydney night is something the Enhanced Games can never replicate, no matter how much money it throws at athletes to “safely” take performance-enhancing drugs.
Bravo to Australian swimmer Kyle Chalmers, who knocked back “life-changing” money to join the freak show, which will hold its first event in Las Vegas in May.
Others, though, are gobbling up the cash. Olympic swimmer Ben Proud, 30, became the first British athlete to sign on. American sprinter Fred Kerley, 30, who is serving a suspension for missing doping tests, is the first track athlete to join.
Athletes can do whatever they want. Their career, their body, their tiny, shrivelled testicles. But I’m struggling to understand how there’s anything remotely interesting in watching athletes in the twilight of their careers, or those who have come out of retirement, breaking world records thanks to the best juice money can buy.
The Olympics aren’t perfect – but at least they still mean something.
Boxing’s class act
Hall of Fame boxing trainer Johnny Lewis has paid tribute to Ricky Hatton, the Manchester fighter who famously ended the career of Australia’s Kostya Tszyu.
Hatton, 46, died in the Greater Manchester town of Hyde on Sunday morning. No cause has been given but police are not treating his death as suspicious.
“I was a world champion four times over, but I consider myself a failure,” Hatton said in his 2023 self-titled documentary Hatton. “It wasn’t supposed to end this way.”
Lewis was in Tszyu’s corner for his epic about against Hatton on June 4, 2005, at the MEN Arena in Manchester where he was defending his IBF and The Ring junior welterweight championship.
Tszyu was 35 and hadn’t been beaten in a decade. Hatton was 26 and looking to cause a major upset.
“Nothing was going to stop Ricky that night,” Lewis recalled.
“There wasn’t an empty seat in the place. He was loved and he did what he had to do: he turned it into a street fight.”
A street fight it was, including a few low blows from both fighters. At the end of the ninth, Hatton was cooked. He told his trainer, Billy Graham, he wasn’t coming out.
“I don’t want to hear that from you,” Graham barked. “We knew we would be in this position one day and if you’re not man enough to take advantage, you’re not the fighter we’ve been telling everyone you are.”
By the end of the 11th, Tszyu plopped down on his stool, broken and defeated.
“I stopped that fight and have no regrets about it,” Lewis said.
“Hatton had a full tank of petrol, we were running on empty. I could see an awful result for us if we went out. The next day, he came and spent some time with us. He was a class act.”
Behind the 8-ball
Just as the terms “fire up” and “Schlossy’s shoe” have become legendary terms in the rugby league lexicon, so too will “short ball” after a slew of alleged text messages between South Sydney hooker Brandon Smith, Sydney Roosters lock Victor Radley, and an alleged drug dealer were published on Tuesday.
“G tee up your cousin in sunny coast for me. Little short ball. Short 8 ball if you will,” Radley texted to Smith, according to Queensland police.
“Yeah sweet bro. I’ll give you the contact when I get it,” Smith allegedly replied.
In my limited understanding of such shenanigans, it defeats the purpose of using code when allegedly talking about drugs if you explain in the very same text message exactly what you’re trying to purchase. An eight-ball, I’m informed, is three-and-a-half grams of a powdered substance.
The next day, text messages between Smith and two friends showed him tipping up an alleged dealer and another person about being on debut for Souths.
“Bro I’m paying $91 for first try scorer,” he allegedly said in a text.
The Rabbitohs seem less concerned about this matter than the Roosters even though Smith appeared in Southport Magistrates Court on Thursday and Radley hasn’t been charged.
Roosters chairman Nick Politisdid not follow through on his promise in The Sunday Telegraph in January to sack any of his players pretty much caught in the same suburb as cocaine, let alone using it. Instead, Radley was handed a 10-match ban with no pay along with a $30,000 fine that will be given to St Vincent’s Hospital. Make no mistake: Politis was keen to move on Radley, such was his anger at the embarrassment caused to his club as much as himself.
The Roosters have ploughed millions into its junior academy, selling the safe environment to mums and dads weighing up which club their son should join.
Sacking Radley was problematic from a legal standpoint. Claiming he’d brought the club into disrepute was arguable and would have dragged both parties into a messy negotiation.
It helps when Radley is managed by leading agent Sam Ayoub, with whom Politis has a close relationship.
Wallabies’ warning
“Can I speak frank?” dual-international Sonny Bill Williams said on Stan Sport earlier this week when asked for his thoughts on the All Blacks’ record loss to South Africa.
Yes, you can, Sonny, but don’t call me Frank.
“I feel like this is danger signs for the Wallabies. I’ve been in All Blacks camp where we’ve lost the game and it’s like a morgue. It’s like a national funeral, someone’s died, and I feel that pressure is going to come out.”
Beware the wounded All Blacks is what SBW is telling us here.
The Wallabies head to Eden Park next Saturday brimming with confidence, though.
They haven’t beaten New Zealand in Auckland since 1986 and probably won’t get a better chance than now.
Let’s hope the match officials don’t trash the spectacle as English referee Christophe Ridley, the touch judges and the TMO did in last Saturday’s match between the Wallabies and Argentina in Sydney.
Perfect September day, heaving crowd at Allianz Stadium, two teams willing to use the ball and counter-attack from their own half … only for Ridley to blow penalty after penalty.
Sure, the Wallabies were ill-disciplined, and Argentina deserved their victory, but the officials on duty clearly were not up to it. The TMO’s decision to award Australia a try at the death, despite a pass so forward it could have been a touchdown, defied belief.
It certainly angered Pumas coach Felipe Contepomi, who was steaming in the post-match media conference. Imagine if they’d lost!
The problem for both nations is there’s no real avenue to complain. They can write sternly worded letters to World Rugby and that’s about it.
Gout Gout is big in Germany. Massive. They think he’s wunderbar. Earlier this week, state broadcaster ZDF ran a story on prime-time television about the Ipswich teenager as he prepared for his World Championships debut in the 200m in Tokyo.