At 17, sprinter Gout Gout is drawing comparisons with Usain Bolt before the track worlds

BRISBANE, Australia (AP) – Gout Gout will try to catch up again with world champion Noah Lyles, deal with those inevitable comparisons with Usain Bolt, and then race back to school in Australia.

The track and field world championships will be a short, sharp learning curve for the 17-year-old high school senior who has taken track and field by storm Down Under.

Gout will contest the 200 meters in a big field that includes U.S. star Lyles at Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium, where he’s hoping to lower the Australian record again. He made headlines in December when he ran 20.04 seconds to shatter the national mark that had stood since 1968, making him the fastest 16-year-old ever over the distance. He lowered that to 20.02 at the Ostrava Golden Spike meet in June.

Gout will enter the worlds, which start Saturday, ranked 16th internationally in the 200 – he didn’t enter the 100 or the 4×100 relay – but his ranking belies the promise. He’s almost four years younger than the next-youngest runner in the World Athletics’ top 16. He was born a decade after Lyles, who has won the 200 at the last three worlds and who won the Olympic gold in the 100 at Paris last year.

“He may be 17, but I think it’s possible for him to reach the 200-meter final in Tokyo, which would be an extraordinary achievement at his age – even Usain Bolt couldn’t do that,” long-time sports commentator Bruce McAvaney said in his preview for Australia’s SBS TV. “It’s going to be fascinating to watch his journey.”

He certainly has the attention of sports fans everywhere in Australia, where Gout is already being tipped to win gold at the 2032 Olympics in Brisbane.

Gout has posted two wind-assisted times under 20 seconds, clocking 19.84 and 19.98 in April, but neither was considered legal because the wind was above allowable threshholds.

Even without those two sub-20 times, he’s still in the top seven all-time for Under-20s in the half-lap sprint, a list that includes Bolt.

“My top-end speed is my secret, so I’ve just got to focus on the first 100, first 50, and once I get out of that bend, I know I can run people down,” Gout said. “So stay relaxed, stay focused, and just power through.”

Australian TV audiences have seen plenty of vision of Gout running – and some have compared the upright technique, high knee lift and dramatic acceleration with the style made famous by Bolt, the greatest sprinter of all time.

“In the moment, it feels great because everyone wants to be compared to Usain, but at times it does get a bit overwhelming,” Gout said on his Australian Athletics profile. “Now that I’ve grown up and I’m a bit mature, my circle really helps me stay level and I’m just basically trying to make a name for myself. Although I do run like Usain Bolt, I do maybe look like him in a couple of ways. I’m just trying to be myself.”

His father Bona and mother Monica moved from South Sudan via Egypt to Australia and arrived in 2006. Gout Gout was born in December 2007 in Ipswich, a one-hour bus ride from 2032 Olympics host city Brisbane.

He caught the attention of coaches at an Ipswich Grammar School athletics carnival in 2020 and soon after, with his first pair of spikes, competed at a prestigious meet for mostly private schools at the age of 12. The following year, he joined long-time coach Di Sheppard’s training squad and things really took off.

“She basically told me I could be great,” Gout reflected, “and that was the first time anyone ever told me something like that.”

Sheppard has declared to Australian media that Gout can win a gold medal in 2032, and the young sprinter is happy to run with that.

He won a silver medal at the 2024 world junior championships in Lima, Peru and signed with Adidas last October. He was back to racing at high school meets in November and December, caught up with Lyles in the U.S., and then returned to Australia to pull crowds for the open track season.

In a television interview last December, Gout’s father said the young athlete’s name had long been misspelled and should be Guot – pronounced Guot, not like the painful inflammatory joint ailment gout.

But James Templeton, the young sprinter’s manager and agent who has worked previously with the likes of David Rudisha and Bernard Lagat, later told Australian radio station SEN that for now, “Categorically, it’s Gout Gout … it’s how it’s going to be.”

Templeton said he has been basically giving a “blanket no” to every media request for Gout for 18 months because of his young age.

“It’s all going to be ahead of him,” Templeton said. “We want his life to be as normal as possible for as long as possible.”