The national championships were supposed to be a showdown; they turned into a showcase.
Gout Gout and Lachie Kennedy were supposed to go head-to-head; instead they went stride for stride, record for record. This isn’t a rivalry, it’s an era.
Gout is now the greatest junior of all time. His 19.67 seconds run on Sunday, when he became the first Australian ever to break 20s, gave him the record for the fastest man under the age of 20 the world has ever seen over 200 metres.
Australia had never had one person break 20; suddenly there were two. Not only did Gout become the first Australian to break 20 seconds in the 200m final, Aidan Murphy become the second. In the same race, Murphy ran 19.88s. And so an extra rivalry, or more importantly, an extra leg of a sprint relay team, also emerges.
Nine seconds one day, 19 the next. Three sprinters ran under 10 and 20 seconds in two days. Just one of those performances would make it a remarkable weekend, but four of them is incomprehensible.
The significance of what is happening now in Australian athletics cannot be overstated, and that is without getting to the middle distance runners.
We won’t get to those middle distance runners here because, well, sprinters. Nothing intoxicates and captivates people like sprinters, and not only do we have our two fastest ever arriving at the same time, but also a third in Murphy, son of dual Commonwealth Games gold medallist Tania Van Heer, from nowhere.
The Gout phenomenon has meant that even though Kennedy beat him over 200m last year it did not dim the lights on Gout because his age so freakishly marked him out. When Kennedy then broke 10 seconds last year in Africa in the 100m, then again beat Gout head-to-head in the 200 at the Maurie Plant meet last month, he shifted the spotlight.
When Kennedy broke 10 seconds in Australia on Friday and backed it up on Saturday, he completely changed the conversation about him. And like Gout, teased at the idea of what the 22-year-old could be when he peaks.
Sprinting is dominated by Caribbean and African-American runners. But now the world is as fixated on a young Australian kid running sub-10 as we are.
Kennedy breaking 10 for a third time in months, and twice in days in Australia, says he is now world-class. Once in a small meet in Africa is one thing, but doing it twice in good but far from perfect conditions in Sydney is another.
Until you can break 10 regularly, you are not really in the conversation among the world’s best. Kennedy is now in that conversation. His management no longer has to ask wealthy Diamond League meetings if he can race there – they are asking him. Even the Commonwealth Games, in Glasgow later this year, now take on a new complexion with a sub-10 runner and Murphy sub-20.
The Usain Bolt comparisons about Gout have made some uncomfortable, including recently the former world champion Christian Coleman, who feel it’s unfair on the runner to be likened to the greatest athlete of all time.
The problem is that Gout keeps stacking up performances where Bolt is the only marker against whom to reference him. As a teenager, Bolt never ran anything like the 19.67 seconds Gout ran on Sunday.
Only one other person, Erriyon Knighton, has run faster under the age of 20 than Gout. He clocked 19.49 seconds in 2022, but that time was never ratified as a world record by World Athletics because the meet where he ran it failed to meet mandatory anti-doping testing requirements. Knighton is currently serving a four-year drug ban, confirmed in September last year, after returning a positive test to steroids in early 2024.
There is also a natural wariness of being sucked in by hype about the next sporting prodigy, only for the declarations of imminent greatness proving to be self-defeating. The point is, Gout is already our greatest ever. He did that when he broke Peter Norman’s 200m record while still wearing school pants. He has now become the world’s greatest ever junior.
This does not mean Gout will be Bolt and go on to achieve Bolt-like things. What it means is that Gout has already become bona fide world-class. He showed that last year by making the semi-finals at the world championships when he still needed to wag a few days of school to be there.
Most critically, Gout has continued to improve from those schoolboy performances. He will plateau at some point, but not yet.
Like Kennedy backing up his first sub-10 run with two more, Gout proved he is only getting quicker. Of course as a teenager he should get stronger and quicker as he gets older but no one could expect this pace of change.
Breaking 20 seconds in the 200m is psychologically enormous. Kennedy showed that by breaking 10 in the 100. Once he’d done it once, it shifted his mindset of what was possible and helped him recalibrate what he expected of himself when he ran.
Gout’s disappointing race in Melbourne at the Maurie Plant Meet showed him he needs to be able to turn up in any conditions. Being the first Australian to break 20 in his very next race showed he understood that. Like Kennedy, he now knows sub-20 is his new normal.
What Kennedy, and Murphy, have done this weekend is emphatically state this is not just the Gout sprinting generation. This is an Australian sprinting, an Australian athletics, golden age.
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.
