‘What’s this, Mr Hollywood?”

Di Sheppard has been pacing up and down.

By her estimation training started 15 minutes ago and while the rest of her squad are getting themselves ready, the star of the show is late.

When Gout Gout appears with a television crew in tow, she hits him straight between the eyes. He tries to explain that it wasn’t actually his fault but the veteran coach won’t have a bar of it.

“Early is on time, on time is late,” she bellows.

The exchange gives an insight into the unique relationship which is driving the most exciting athlete to emerge on the Australian sporting landscape for some time. Gout, who turned 17 in December, is already the fastest Australian in history over 200m and is being hailed as the next Usain Bolt.

Even the greatest sprinter to ever grace the track acknowledges the young Queenslander bears a striking resemblance to him when he runs.

“He looks like young me,” Bolt posted on social media after Gout broke Peter Norman’s 56-year-old national 200m record in December.

Broadcasting legend Bruce McAvaney is at the training session as part of a special Channel 7 is doing on Gout. He is taken by the young sprinter and can’t help but draw parallels with Cathy Freeman, the hero of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

Gout will be 24 when the Olympics are in his hometown of Brisbane in 2032. Already the pressure and expectation is building around that moment even before the city has even figured out where the stadium he will run in will be.

While Sheppard, who discovered Gout when she saw him doing a sprint across the rugby field at Ipswich Grammar School, is very protective she isn’t afraid to declare where she sees the Gout story going.

“We don’t do if, we do when,” she says when asked about whether Gout can become an Olympic champion.

Los Angeles in three years time is a possibility, if not there then Brisbane is a certainty.

Sheppard actually told Gout he’d win an Olympic gold medal back in 2020 when she was trying to convince him to join her training squad. She’d been the athletics coach at the school for 25 years and had never seen anything like the 12-year-old year 7 student.

Gout believed her and switched from soccer to athletics, beginning a story which is straight out of a Hollywood movie script. The only question which remains about that is a big one – will it get its happy ending?

John Steffensen has been where Gout wants to go. He won the 400m gold medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, won an Olympic relay silver medal and competed in a world championships final.

He knows the path which is ahead for the schoolboy sensation and as much as he loves the hype and excitement Gout is generating, he says people should proceed with caution.

“I think the pressure is only getting more,” Steffensen says.

“What he is doing is phenomenal but where is his ceiling?

“We have got to enjoy it for what it is, one step at a time and enjoy the now with him and not look towards the future. If you understand track and field, there is more let down in the game than what there is highs. Making comparisons and where his projected future is going, I just don’t buy into that.

“The couch potato, if you want to entertain them, by all means go ahead, they will buy into it but they will be the very same people who will turn on him when he doesn’t win a senior championship.

“People are going to set the bar too high.”

Steffensen recently received a text message from Michael Johnson, the four-time Olympic champion and former 200m and 400m world record holder. The American legend had seen an interview he’d done about Gout and wanted to let him know he agreed with his call for caution.

“We all know the game,” Steffensen says.

He is also good mates with Bolt, often chaperoning him on his visits to Australia, but points out the great Jamaican’s success wasn’t without hiccups. He was a junior world champion who then lost his way through injury for a couple of years before emerging to become an eight-time Olympic gold medallist.

“What I say to people every time he (Gout) is on the track, just enjoy it, enjoy his energy, enjoy his infectious smile and enjoy his technique,” Steffensen says.

“It’s beautiful to watch and he is running fast as a young bloke. How good is that and he’s an Australian. That’s all we need to focus on, he’s an Aussie kid who has got the world on notice. Just enjoy it now.”

Australia’s fastest ever man, Patrick Johnson, is coming from a similar viewpoint and desperately just wants Gout to enjoy every moment now. He has reached out to Sheppard and Gout, congratulating them on what they’ve achieved so far and is excited that his national 100m record of 9.93sec, set in 2003, is under serious threat.

Gout ran a wind-assisted 10.04sec in December at the Australian All-Schools Championships in Brisbane, the day before he broke Peter Norman’s 1968 200m record, clocking 20.04sec which is faster than Bolt ran at the same age.

“When I texted Di I said enjoy it for what it is, you want to make history that is a long-lasting history that you can enjoy,” Johnson says.

“For me I was the first (to break 10 seconds) but I never wanted to be the last, that is the way I have always pushed it. Records are meant to be broken, I want to see it broken but then go to another level, not just have it be a one-off.”

Johnson, who is a member of the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Organising Committee, wants everyone to “take a breath”.

“All the eyes are looking at him, the world is looking at him, his family is looking at him, sponsors are looking at him,” Johnson says.

“Let him enjoy it, let him be free, when he is free, when he is running and having fun, we will see the best of him.”

Gout is also the poster boy for a resurrection in the sprinting ranks in Australia, something which warms the heart of Matt Shirvington, one of Australia’s greatest sprinters. He just failed to break the magical 10-second barrier – he ran 10.03sec at the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games – and says Gout will do it soon and then do it “a hundred times”.

But he mightn’t be the only one, with another Queenslander, 21-year-old Lachlan Kennedy, the fastest this year with a 10.03sec in Perth earlier this month. Kennedy then went to the world indoor championships in China last weekend and won Australia’s first silver medal in the 60m event. Then there are Sydneysiders Olympic semi-finalist Rohan Browning, who has a career-best 10.01sec and produced a season-opening 10.12sec two weeks ago, while reigning national champion Sebastian Sultana (10.11sec) and Joshua Azzopardi (10.09sec) are also in the conversation.

“We’ve got this sprint-making machine in Australia at the moment,” Shirvington says.

“The biggest cog is Gout in that machine but it is just producing sprinter after sprinter after sprinter at the moment. The 100 is always going to be the blue riband event but (Usain) Bolt has put the 200 equally on par with it by doing that triple double (Olympic gold) which he did in his career.

“Maybe this is the answer, the reason we have this crop of sprinters is the attention Gout is getting. While it is good for him I also know personally how much harder you train when you know someone else is doing something great. You believe in your ego, you think, ‘Well, I need to train harder to be as good to beat him’, you believe that when you go to training and I think that’s a big part of it too.”

So why is Gout so fast?

Shirvington likens him to swimming great Ian Thorpe, saying he is genetically born to be a champion. Thorpe famously had the large feet, which some called “flippers”, which was the genetic trait that helped him become the best swimmer in the world.

“When you see him (Gout) in person, his physicality, it’s like his legs, bum and hip position are made out of the strongest titanium steel you have ever seen and just positioned perfectly,” he says.

“He is what Ian Thorpe was to swimming, he is built to be a runner, he is absolutely built to do it and he is letting his body do it. He’s got his foot off the brake and is just freewheeling, letting the machine roll. He is just a natural runner who is letting his body do the work.”

The upright stance and long stride length is what draws the Bolt comparisons.

Gout looks like he’s floating sometimes given how far he seems to be off the ground with each bound.

This is all about the force he’s producing through the transfer of power when his feet hit the ground which creates a sling shot feel when he comes off the bend in 200m races.

“It’s like you’re floating, especially how high I get off the ground when I’m running, it definitely feels like I’m floating, it feels like I’m just slicing through the air,” Gout says.

“It feels like basically a lightning bolt.”

Billionaire Kerry Stokes is an athletics aficionado. It stems from his childhood in Melbourne where he fancied himself as a sprinter with the Preston Harriers Athletics Club. Gout came on to Stokes’ radar – and the rest of the world’s for that matter – last year when a video of him setting a personal best of 10.29sec at the Queensland Athletics Championships in March went viral around the world on social media, collecting more than one million views on Instagram and YouTube.

There was another surge after the world junior championships in Peru in August, just two weeks after the Paris Olympics, where Gout won the silver medal in the U/20 200m behind South Africa’s Bayanda Walaza who was almost two years older.

“It was great because the whole world definitely saw me and what I could potentially do in the future,” Gout says about that race.

His time of 20.60sec was the fastest ever run by a 16-year-old at the event, taking the record – which had stood for 22 years – off eight-time Olympic champion Bolt.

So when Gout broke Peter Norman’s Australian record in December, the Channel 7 chairman set up a meeting.

Stokes flew to Melbourne and arranged for Gout and his manager, James Templeton, to have a sit down. For 45 minutes, one of Australia’s richest and most powerful men chewed the fat with the teenager.

He just wanted to meet the kid, find out about his background and passion for the sport. It wasn’t a business meeting, although Stokes made it clear should Gout need anything, he was there to support his journey.

Stokes wasn’t the only businessman who had been in touch with Templeton. Major shoe companies had started reaching out over the previous 12 months but Templeton had held his nerve, taking the punt that Gout’s value would keep rising.

He knew these companies liked to snare the “next big thing” young and Puma had famously signed Bolt when he was 16.

After a spirited bidding war between brands Gout signed with adidas – the company’s overseas boss wanted the 16-year-old after seeing one of the viral race videos – in October to a multimillion-dollar contract over six years, easily one of the biggest deals ever for an Australian track and field athlete.

It was a life-changing moment for Gout’s family although there has been a concerted effort not to change anything yet.

That will come in time, with plans for a new car and new house for the family – Gout has six siblings – down the track.

But right now Australia’s next sporting star is happy to keep sharing a bedroom with his older brother, Mawien, 22, in the family’s four-bedroom home in Spring Mountain, a 40-minute drive from Brisbane.

Gout’s father, Bona, works in a kitchen at a local hospital during the day and drives an Uber at night. His mother, Monica, used to be a cleaner but now is a stay-at-home parent.

The couple fled war-torn South Sudan in 2005 when Mawien was a toddler. They first went to Egypt where Gout’s older sister Achel, 18, was born before moving to Australia. Gout was born in Brisbane in 2007 and was followed by sister Atong, 14, identical twin girls Adit and Achan, 12, and brother Bol, 10, who is happy to tell everyone he will be faster than his brother.

They help to keep Gout grounded as he looks to combine his rising stardom with completing year 12 studies.

Templeton and Sheppard are wary not to do too much. On the track they know his body is still growing so they’ve been conservative with things like weight programs and have spaced his races.

Off-the-track there are blue-chip companies, both local and overseas, lining up wanting a piece of Gout but Templeton, who previously managed Olympic middle-distance champion David Rudisha and world champion Bernard Lagat, has put them all on hold,

“We’re not in a rush,” he says.

Gout’s first taste of life in the fast lane came in January when the trio travelled to Florida to train with Olympic champion Noah Lyles who has invited him back for another stint later in the year.

The American superstar quickly took a liking to the young Aussie, having him as a guest on his popular podcast where Gout declared he was coming for Lyles’ title at the world championships in Tokyo in September.

“Whatever I’ve got to do to show Noah I am coming for that spot (I will do),” Gout says.

“Obviously, it’s a learning experience but deep down I’m trying to get a medal for sure or even make that final and be running up Noah or trying to chase Noah down for sure.”

Lyles, who has won the past three world 200m titles, loved what he was hearing.

“I want you to come up to me and say ‘I’m going to take your spot’,” Lyles says.

“C’mon don’t be scared to tell me your dreams, shout them from the top of the mountain. Come after me.”

Gout is used to the comparisons with Bolt now but he remains humble and simply says he’s looking forward to creating his own path.

“I’m just trying to make a name for myself. Although I do run like Usain Bolt and I do maybe look like him, I’m just trying to be myself and trying to be the next Gout.”

On Saturday night, Gout is the headline act at the Maurie Plant Meet at Lakeside Stadium where a sell-out is on the cards. Already ticket sales are up 60 per cent with a crowd of almost 8000 expected.

While there are plenty of other stars on show, led by Botswana’s Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo who is running the 400m, there is no doubt who a majority of the spectators are there to see.

“I talk to people who have no idea about any other Australian track and field athlete but they know who Gout is,” Shirvington says.

“I am surprised now if I say the word Gout and they don’t know who he is.

“That is so rare now.”