Gout Gout’s speed makes us hasty. It makes us into the kids in the back of the car, asking “are we there yet?”
No, Gout isn’t there yet. The fact he lost on Saturday night does not mean he won’t get there – it’s just that Lachie Kennedy is much closer.
The fact Gout’s loss on Saturday night to Kennedy was his second time in successive Maurie Plant Meets is no cause for concern.
We should not be worried whether Gout will live up to expectations. He lost a race narrowly to the fastest man in Australia. He lost that by 0.05 seconds and ran 20s flat in the rain in Melbourne. When you don’t run especially well and still do that, it is still a good night.
Whatever Gout does or does not do this year or into the future does not alter the irrefutable fact he has repeatedly run faster than any Australian of any age over 200 metres. And he first did it as a 16-year-old.
He went to the world championships, wedged between school terms, and in front of a packed Tokyo stadium made the semi-final racing the best men in the world.
But Gout is a still a teenager, barely a man. He has still predominantly trained and run in Queensland heat and humidity against other teenagers. He came to cooler Melbourne, the rain fell and he ran second to a man we should really be spending more time talking about.
If it weren’t for Gout and his extraordinarily precocious success, we would be fixated on Kennedy.
But it need not be binary. Kennedy too is a star.
Kennedy beating Gout last year was an upset, because while he was known to be quick he hadn’t really done anything. Since then he has broken 10s for the 100m when he ran 9.98s in Nairobi and became only the second Australian man after Patrick Johnson (9.93s in 2003) to do so.
Kennedy is a generational athlete who has had the misfortune of arriving in the sport on a regular timeline. He wasn’t a schoolboy when he broke through. He was young but not crazy young. His lineage was familiar old Australia, not new and potentially culturally transformative. He hadn’t been quicker than Bolt as a boy.
“He gets it, Gout is younger and his ceiling is unknown, he is really exciting. But what is really exciting is the prospect of what these two sprinters could do,” Kennedy’s coach Andrew Iselin said on Sunday.
The most impressive thing about Kennedy on Saturday night was that he ran 10.03 seconds for the 100m in mild conditions in Melbourne. Having broken 10 in favourable conditions in the last year, this was reinforcement that Kennedy is now a 10-flat runner in any conditions. The run in Nairobi will not be the last time the 22-year-old runs sub-10.
On Saturday night after the 100m he was so cooked he had to lie down and try to sleep between races with his team holding his legs up in the air to try to stop them cramping. Iselin was close to getting him to pull out of the 200m. But Kennedy wasn’t. He loves to race.
He wants to run the sprint double at nationals in April and at the Commonwealth Games later this year. He wants to race everything and win everything. He wants all the records, whether they are Gout’s, Johnson’s or Bolt’s.
The fact Kennedy focuses on the 100m means he seldom runs a 200m when he is fresh because the 100m is nearly always first.
“He has the 200 record in his sights. He is capable of running 19 seconds for the 200 if he ever gets a chance to run it fresh. He is definitely capable of breaking 20. But it is rare he gets that opportunity,” Iselin said.
“He is getting stronger. To go out and run 10.03s in Melbourne (for the 100m), that is a 9.8s in Brisbane conditions. He is now a 10 flat runner in any conditions. He is now keen to race some faster people.
“Nothing fazes him. He doesn’t care about the focus on Gout. He likes Gout, he understands why people focus on him because of what he has done. But he just loves to race and to win.”
Athletics is in a glory period. Albert Park was sold out on Saturday night. It was largely down to Gout, but not all.
On one side of the track in the shadows of lighting that an AFL team would complain about having to train under, world and Olympic champions Nina Kennedy and Nicola Olyslagers sailed over bars.
Cam Myers and Claudia Hollingsworth, who are as good as any middle distance runners in the world, and could prove to be as good as any Australia has ever produced, both won. Hollingsworth beat the Olympic silver medallist who has just won the world indoor title. Myers put the hammer down with 500m to go and won by a margin that befits his dominance of the event
Hollingsworth is 20. Myers 19, Kennedy just turned 22 and Gout only 18.
They will all get there, these are athletics’ salad days. No need to worry.
Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.
