Gout Gout has run the 200 meters in 19.67 seconds. No teenager in history has run it faster. The Brisbane sprinter clocked that time in Sydney last month, and the time itself would have been good enough for bronze at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
He is 18. He just finished high school with straight A’s. He stands 6 feet tall and weighs less than 150 pounds, which is small for a world-class sprinter. Usain Bolt raced at 6 feet 5 inches and 207 pounds. Bolt has watched Gout run and said, “He looks like young me.” Gout has broken the world age-group record Bolt set in 2003.
In a 60 Minutes profile that aired this month, Gout was asked what running gives him. “Running just feeds that, I guess, inner child in me that wants to, you know, kind of feel free,” he said. “Like running makes me feel like myself for sure.”
His parents emigrated from South Sudan to Brisbane in 2005 and raised seven kids there. His dad runs the dishwashing operation at the local hospital. His mom works at home. Both declined to be interviewed and have handed the public-facing parts of their son’s career to his coach, Dianne Shepard.
Shepard, known as Di, has no formal track background. She spotted Gout sprinting across a field at Ipswich Grammar School when he was in roughly seventh grade. To be eligible to coach there, she quit a supermarket job and took one handing out school uniforms. “I looked at him and just went, ‘Oh my god,'” she told 60 Minutes about that first day. “It was just like, ‘This kid’s a real deal.'”
Gout knows the pairing is unusual. “Old white lady and a young black kid, you know, it’s crazy dynamic, but turns out it works perfectly,” he said.
Long Achilles, fewer steps
Dylan Hicks, a movement scientist at Flinders University in Adelaide, recently published an academic paper on Gout’s stride. He has long Achilles tendons that store and release more elastic energy than most. He takes fewer steps down the track than his rivals.
Gout can struggle out of the blocks. What separates him is how long he can hold close to his top-end speed of about 25 mph. “If I have a good start, you know, it’s kind of over cuz my top end speed is great,” he said. “And once I get in the top end speed, I’m flying.”
Shepard is keeping him on a junior training workload. “If I tried to make him super quick now, I’d break him,” she said. She added that Gout only hit puberty in the past 12 to 18 months and used to walk on his toes.
Brand money, same coach
Reports put Gout’s Adidas deal at a base of more than $4 million over eight years. Vegemite has released a signature product. He has stayed at the same school setup and with the same coach through all of it.
Last summer he made his European pro debut at the Ostrava meet in the Czech Republic and won the 200 with a personal best. Shepard wasn’t celebrating. “I’m big on stepping stones,” she said. “We’re not doing victory laps for what you did when you were 17 years old.”
At the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo last fall, he was the youngest 200-meter sprinter in the field. He placed fourth in his semi-final and did not reach the final. The Sydney 19.67 came after that.
A home Olympics in 2032
The 2032 Summer Olympics are in Brisbane, the only place Gout has lived. He will be 24, the age at which most sprinters peak. “We’re in Brisbane, you know, like this is home,” he said. “Place I grew up.”
He says he is trying not to push too hard too fast. “It’s crazy to think about how you want to run as fast as possible, but you don’t want to overload too much when you’re a teenager, cuz then that messes up the rest of your career,” he said. “You got all the time in the world.”
Asked about being famous, he pushed back on the word. “Me personally, I didn’t call it fame,” he said. “I like to call it well known in the wider community.”
