Gout Gout one-ups Usain Bolt, storms into world title semis

Tokyo: Expectation is still yet to collide with reality. The stunning, inexorable rise of the precocious star Gout Gout is gathering pace, not fading.

The 17-year-old sprinting phenomenon made it out of his heat into a semi-final at his first major championship – something Usain Bolt didn’t do.

The year 12 Ipswich schoolboy who has breezily collected sprint records like they are rare vinyl, clicked past another premature milestone, getting out of the heats at his first major open age championships while still a junior.

Gout finished third in 20.23 seconds in the 200 metres of the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo. His semi-final is on Thursday night AEST.

“It’s great experience. I mean, running against the big dogs, you know, it’s great – I’m just excited for more,” Gout said.

“It is definitely great to know that I’m up against [the] top 24 in the world, pretty much. So it’s just a great experience.

“I’ve been in Japan since Friday, and [getting to] today felt so long, and today just happened [quickly]. So it’s a pinch myself moment.”

Breaking the 20-second barrier in the semi-finals is his goal now. Do that, and he’s a chance to make the final.

“Sub 20 has to go. So let’s see, in the semi,” he said, adding: “Hopefully I get a start… and I’m off like a butterfly.

“I’ll just run with freedom [in the semi-final]. Yeah, it’s a free hit. [I’ll] just go out there, run, run like a horse. Run like the wind, you know?”

The list of Bolt comparisons are long, and this race creates another parallel. Initially, the likeness was Gout’s tall gait – a similarity even Bolt recognises – but then he began running quicker than Bolt did at the same junior ages. When Bolt went to his first major adult championships, the 2004 Olympics as a 17-year-old, he didn’t get through to the semis. Admittedly, he was carrying a leg injury.

“I mean, he is the guy, Usain Bolt – he’s the athlete everyone looks up to. So [I’ve] just gotta keep looking up to him and trying to be like him, too,” Gout said.

A doubtful public has wanted to believe in Gout’s legitimacy on the world stage but has been sceptical of media hyperbole. But this performance further validates the expectation.

Gout calmly swallowed the fact he is slow out of the blocks and understood he was a runner with better top-end speed than his rivals, whatever age gap they have on him, and he just needed enough time and track to hit that speed for long enough to gather them all in. He had just enough track to do it.

It was figured he might have to break 20 seconds to make the semi-finals, but Gout was confident he could take third. He was the third-fastest runner this year in his heat after Jamaican Bryan Levell and Zimbabwe’s Makanakaishe Charamba. And so it proved – that pair crossed the line ahead of him, Levell winning in 19.84s and Charamba second in 20.06.

“I just felt that in my heat, everyone wasn’t up against me, apart from the top two. So I just hit cruise control, in the last 50, last 30 metres – so that’s what I needed,” Gout said.

His heat on Wednesday night was just the latest, seemingly effortless step in a stunning 12 months.

Remember, less than a year ago as a 16-year-old he broke Peter Norman’s national record when he ran 20.04s at the All-Schools in Queensland, and then he went to the nationals and broke the 20-second barrier. He ran 19.84, but the wind gusted up just a little too high to make it legal.

But, that mark was also the 10th quickest time this year by any athlete in all conditions. And several of those others in that top 10 were not in Tokyo because they didn’t make the US team.

Gout then went back to school and in his school holidays went to Europe where, in his first-ever serious international open race, he ran 20.02 and broke his own record at the Ostrava Diamond League meeting.

He started slowly, as is his norm, but coming off the bend is where his race starts. He has a top-end speed superior to most runners, and he can hold that speed at length. His issue is how long it takes him to get to that speed after slows starts.

On Wednesday, he looked to accelerate when others were slowing, which is his thing. The second half of his 200s should never be missed.

It was a mature run. Sounds funny, that – a mature race, for a 17-year-old. But this would have been a mature race had he been 27.

He knew what he was doing, simplified the task and narrowed the focus to the gap between the two white lines of his lane and not the egos and records of the men outside those lanes.

The beautiful simplicity of sprinting lends itself to the character who can distil his task to its basest level. A start, a finish and go as fast as you can between the two points. For all the histrionics around you and the event, nothing else matters.

Gout has that guileless ability to do that and blinker everything else out – and to do it very, very quickly. It is not dissimilar to how he has handled his meteoric rise to fame on an international level. While those around him, those looking out for him, try to shield him from distractions, he seems to look at them as if to say, “Why would I be distracted? Isn’t that all part of the fun?”

Gout can separate the noise from the music.

‘I didn’t want to cry on TV’: Torrie Lewis sets personal-best time

Torrie Lewis clearly races well when she is angry. And frees herself of expectation.

She was cranky with herself after her 100-metre semi-final, and three nights later she took it out on the track in her 200m heat.

Lewis ran a personal-best 22.56s in an aggressive run, chasing Great Britain’s Dina Asher-Smith on her inside lane to do as she did in the 100m and make it through to the semi-finals. She came second to Asher-Smith’s 22.40s.

Lewis’ time was the eighth-quickest of the heats and made for a sprint semi-final double for her.

It was some satisfaction for the 20-year-old, who, despite running one of the fastest times ever by an Australian on Sunday night, was still dirty on herself for not doing better, and missing a chance to do something special. No one else thought likewise, or had any sense of disappointment over her semi-final run, figuring she had not done poorly nor wasted a chance. But she did – she’s that kind of competitor.

“Last time [in the 100m] I put so much pressure on it and had so many expectations,” Lewis said.

“It was so meaningful to me, that race. I had so many high expectations coming into it, I really thought I could make the final. So I was not looking at anything [the time] – I was just looking at did I make that final? And I did not and, to me, that was a failure.

“I knew if I had gone up to the media box then I would have cried, and I didn’t want to cry on TV.”

Sport offers second chances and at the world championships they can serve them up quickly. Three nights after that 100m semi-final, Lewis smashed through her 200m heat.

“[Tonight] I was just trying to see how it goes and run hard (with fewer expectations).”

She aimed for a PB, which she got, and it was enough to make the semi-final. She aims to do the same in the semi – if she can run a PB she can maybe make a final.

Lewis moved to the Netherlands at the start of the year to train with a Dutch master, Femke Bol. The move, she said, had changed and matured her, despite an Achilles injury at the start of 2025 delaying her year. She trained differently, trained harder and raced herself to fitness after the injury.

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