Untapered, unruffled and unstoppable, sprinter Gout Gout has continued his sparkling summer by adding another title to his cabinet at the Queensland Athletics Championships in Brisbane.
Three months after breaking the Australian 200m record at the same track, the teenager warmed up for the Maurie Plant meet in Melbourne by claiming the state under-20 100m crown on Saturday.
Gout revealed he has been targeting the Maurie Plant meet on 29 March for something special so he is in the middle of a heavy training block.
Still, the 17-year-old clocked 10.39 seconds into a slight headwind and slowing up before the line in his heat then running 10.38s in the final.
“It’s one of the top 10 times of my career, so I couldn’t be happier,” Gout said.
The Queensland sprinter set a wind-assisted 10.04s personal best at the Australian All Schools Championships in Brisbane last year.
His top legal time is 10.17s which puts him in the selection frame for the world championships in Japan in September.
Gout recently returned from a Florida training camp where he trained with Olympic champion Noah Lyles and the American’s coach Lance Brauman.
The gains he made in that brief stint were not so much physical. He concentrated on adding psychological muscle to an already impressive mindset that has had to cope with extraordinary public focus.
Although still at school, Gout is racing against men, has signed a long-term sponsorship deal with sportswear giant Adidas and faces enormous expectation every time he competes.
The experience with Lyles exposed him to a larger-than-life character with a proven record for converting pressure into stellar performance.
“I just learned to be myself and follow my processes,” Gout said. “You can do all the work in the world but if you’re in good mental shape you’ll be right.”
Only one other Australian, Patrick Johnson, has a time under 10 seconds over 100 metres. Johnson’s 9.93s, set in 2003, remains the benchmark.
Gout isn’t the only young gun firing Australian athletics to new sprint heights.
Two-time Olympian Rohan Browning slipped into Brisbane for a cameo in the men’s 100m B final, posting a sizzling 10.12s.
Fellow Queenslander Lachlan Kennedy clocked an eye-catching 10.03s at the Perth Track Classic earlier this month.
The 21-year-old Kennedy, Browning, Sebastian Sultana, Joshua Azzopardi and Jacob Despard all have faster times over the distance than Gout.
Gout could yet face that quintet at the Stawell Gift on Easter Monday.
But Gout’s more immediate target will be his first 200m race of the season at the Queensland Championships in Brisbane on Sunday.
In December last year the teenage sprinting sensation put the world on notice when he broke the Australian 200m sprint record set by Peter Norman 56 years ago – at just a month shy of 17.
That time of 20.04s (+1.5m/s) would have seen Gout finish sixth in the final of the event at the Paris Olympics last year.
