While Gout has a personal best of 20.02, Kennedy’s charge was made all the more remarkable given he was coming off a lengthy injury lay-off.
Gout Gout pictured at the Stawell Gift earlier this year.Credit: Luke Hemer
The teenager celebrated with an elated fist pump to the crowd as he edged ahead of Ipswich’s Jonathon Kasiano – Gout’s best mate, relay ally and 2025 under-18s 200m Australian Athletics Championships victor.
“I hadn’t sprinted in 15 weeks coming off the hamstring injury and I missed the GPS rugby season, so I was just happy to be back and happy to be running well,” Kennedy said.
“I have a great rehab team at home and here with BGS … we all came together. We tried to rush back to play rugby, and then that didn’t work out, so I really just tried to get this one done.
“It’s paid off.”
Kasiano would eventually rally to claim the 100 metres in Gout’s absence (10.50), while Kennedy would ultimately face the 17-year-old champion in the 400 metres, the event he won at the under-18 Australian Athletics Championships in Perth.
But the emerging global phenomenon proved a class above, with his sights now set on delivering the nation its first men’s sprinting Olympic gold medal at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
The South Sudanese-Australian returned to Brisbane from September’s World Championships in Tokyo flushed with insights into what heights he will need to attain to make such lofty goals a reality.
The next three years will now be spent by athletics followers salivating at the thought of what he and 21-year-old Queensland Paris Olympian Lachlan Kennedy – whose 100-metre best of 9.98 is the second best among Australian men in history – could achieve.
The door may be closed on Gout’s schoolboy days, but the legacy he will leave on his alma mater – and Brisbane in general – will resonate, with his fan base growing by the day.
“It definitely feels great to know I have a very big fan base, especially from all ages of very, very young to adults like yourselves,” Gout said.
“I haven’t sprinted since worlds, so I can’t wait to go out there with my friends and enjoy the moment.”
What was a starker measure of the precocious excellence of Gout than his performance against the world’s fastest men at the recent World Athletics Championships in Tokyo was his effort against his current actual peers – schoolboys. Effort is a slightly misplaced word for effort suggests the raising of a sweat, which Gout seemingly did not. Not really.
Only a month ago in Tokyo he raced the world’s fastest men over 200 metres and made the semi-finals. The quickest boys from a scattering of private schools is not quite the same competition, but does provide an age and background relevant comparison to measure his excellence.
Gout will graduate from year 12 in the coming weeks, but he plainly graduated out of the ranks of schoolboy runners long ago. This was his athletics valedictory ball, a dance to farewell schoolboy running.
More to come
