Gout Gout – the Aussie express

Standout teenage sprinter looks like a star in the making, but let’s give him room to develop rather than piling on the pressure, writes Katharine Merry

Even before this year started, we were given another reason to get excited about what might lie ahead for the sport of athletics. He might only recently have celebrated his 17th birthday but already Gout Gout has well and truly made headline news.

In case you haven’t heard, this son of South Sudanese parents who was born in Brisbane has been putting in some scorching performances in his homeland. At the Australian All Schools Athletics Championships in December he ran a wind-assisted 10.04 in the 100m heats, the fourth-fastest time in history for an under 18. His legal time of 10.17 in winning the final by the proverbial country mile put him sixth on the all-time list.

His subsequent performance in the 200m, breaking Peter Norman’s 56-year-old national record of 20.07 – set during the Black Power salute final at the 1968 Olympics – with a run of 20.04 caused even more of a stir.

Quite rightly, everyone is getting very excited about him and, predictably, the comparisons with Usain Bolt have flooded in. Even the great man himself has noted the similarities. First of all, there are the rapid times, but his technique is similar too and he is also tall, skinny and gangly, as the young Bolt was, plus he’s doing what Usain did in ripping up the record books.

I have been hugely impressed by the footage of Gout’s wins and his speed in a straight line, flying away from the opposition in the closing stages, is absolutely phenomenal. To my eye, his style looks pretty sound technically and when you add in the fact that he’s a decent starter too then he is arriving in the spotlight from a very, very good place.

He is still some way short of the finished article, though, and there is so much development for him to go through. One area I think he needs to tidy up on is running the bend in the 200m. He’s 6ft 2in at the moment and he hasn’t stopped growing yet. Running the bend is never an easy thing to do when you’re tall and from what I’ve seen it looks like he’s going to have to learn to negotiate it as best he can in races, rather than being able to bulldoze his way through it in the manner that an athlete of shorter stature with a lower centre of gravity might be able to.

Michael Norman is a rarity in being tall but also having the ability to run his bends in a…