From the razzmatazz of a major athletics meet in Monaco, to the monotony of a school classroom in Queensland. The coming days offer a window into the double life of the boy with the double name – Gout Gout.
On Friday night, the Australian sprint sensation will rub shoulders with the world’s best athletes when he races at a Diamond League event for the first time. But come Monday morning, the 17-year-old dubbed ‘the next Usain Bolt’ will be back mingling with his fellow students at Ipswich Grammar School, on the outskirts of Brisbane.
Gout, who is a prefect at the all-boys’ boarding school, is currently preparing for his Year 12 exams in accounting, biology, English, maths and psychology, the latter of which he plans to study at university.
‘He is an A student,’ his manager James Templeton tells Mail Sport. But he is also an A-star athlete, and before his exams in October and November, he faces another major test – the World Athletics Championships.
Gout has already been selected in Australia’s squad for Tokyo, having run under the 200 metres qualification time on three occasions. And anticipation is building about what the most exciting athlete in a generation could achieve at his first major senior championships. ‘We are not putting any limits on it,’ says Templeton.
Gout was born in Ipswich, near Brisbane as the third of seven children. His parents are from South Sudan but fled the war-torn country to live in Egypt. In 2005, they then moved to Australia, with Gout born two years later.
The coming days reveal the double life of the boy with the double name – Gout Gout
Gout will rub shoulders with the world’s best athletes when he races at a Diamond League
The 17-year-old teenage sprinter sensation has been dubbed ‘the next Usain Bolt’
His father Bona now works as a food technician at a local hospital in the day and an Uber driver at night, while his mother Monica was a cleaner. ‘I have seen what they do and I’ve definitely got a good work ethic off my parents,’ Gout has said.
Gout’s dad revealed last year that the family’s surname is actually Guot, pronounced ‘Gwot’. But it was misspelt when their papers were translated in Arabic upon their move to Egypt and they never got it changed.
As a child, Gout was a keen footballer, idolising Cristiano Ronaldo. However, his potential as a sprinter was spotted when he raced in sand shoes at a school athletics carnival at the age of 13.
‘I saw him running on the oval and there was just something about him and the way he moved,’ said Di Sheppard, the Ipswich Grammar School athletics coach. ‘I couldn’t pinpoint it, but gut instinct just screamed at me, “Who’s that kid?”.’
Sheppard has coached Gout ever since – and she asked Templeton to become his agent three years ago.
‘At the Australian All Schools Championships in 2022, he absolutely stood out, he was outstanding,’ recalls Templeton, who previously looked after middle-distance greats David Rudisha and Bernard Lagat. ‘You didn’t need to be a genius to think, “Oh my god, this kid is special”.
Gout was noticed more widely last August when, at the age of 16, he won a silver medal in the 200m at the World Under-20 Championships in Lima in a time of 20.60sec. Shortly after, he signed his first major contract with Adidas, the sponsors of Olympic 100m champion Noah Lyles.
But it was not until December, following his performances at the Australian All Schools Championships, that Gout really went viral. First, he won the 100m in a national Under-18 record of 10.17sec, having also run a wind-assisted 10.04sec in the heats. Then, he broke Peter Norman’s 56-year-old Australian senior record in the 200m with a time of 20.04sec.
As a child, Gout was a keen footballer, idolising Portuguese super star Cristiano Ronaldo
Gout (right) celebrates with his mother Monica, winning the U18s, 100m final during the Australian All Schools Athletics Championships at Queensland Sport in 2024
Gout celebrates with his manager James Templeton (left) and coach Di Sheppard (right)
It also made him the fastest 16-year-old in history over half a lap – surpassing a certain Jamaican icon.
‘He looks like young me,’ Bolt commented on Instagram below a video of Gout’s eye-catching run. The eight-time Olympic gold medallist, still the 100m and 200m world record holder, was merely saying what everyone else was thinking.
‘The comparisons with Bolt are hard to deny, with running those types of time at that age,’ former British sprinter Darren Campbell tells Mail Sport. ‘The noise he is making across the world, transcending out of athletics, that’s what Bolt did.
‘There is still a long way to go, but like Bolt, he is seeking greatness. He is a generational talent.’
So what does the man himself think about being likened to the greatest of all time?
‘Everyone wants to be the next star, and Usain Bolt is the best athlete, so being compared to him is obviously great,’ said Gout. ‘But I am trying to be the next Gout Gout. I want to be able to make my name as big as his name.’
Gout made that comment earlier this year in a rare interview on a podcast with the sport’s current superstar, Lyles. The pair will be rivals in Tokyo, but they have also formed a friendship after Gout went to Florida in January to train with Lyles, who calls his young challenger his ‘Little Bro’.
More recently, Gout has been training in Tubingen in Germany, the European base used by Rudisha and Lagat at the peak of their careers. He has been there since making his senior international debut and his first European appearance in Ostrava, where he lowered his 200m personal best to 20.02sec.
Gout became fastest 16-year-old in history over half a lap in 2024 – surpassing Bolt
However, after racing in Monaco on Friday, he will fly back to Brisbane on Saturday afternoon and train as normal Down Under for the two months leading up to Tokyo.
Gout’s usual schedule seems him train six days a week – Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays on the grass at school, Tuesdays, Thursday and Saturdays on a track a 30-minute drive from his home.
When it comes to nutrition, he is not ‘obsessive’, according to Templeton, but he has a healthy diet, containing lots of chicken and rice. He certainly does not gorge on Chicken McNuggets, famously the fuel for Bolt’s world records at Beijing 2008, while coach Sheppard’s ‘big thing’ is no sugary drinks.
Away from athletics, Gout is a huge fan of anime and a keen user of TikTok. As for his private life, when Lyles cheekily said to him on his podcast: ‘You must be the man at school, how many girls you pulling?’, he replied with a firm ‘no comment’.
Templeton adds: ‘He is very easy going, happy go lucky. His life is fairly normal and we work to make sure it stays as normal as it can for as long as it can.’
That is partly why Templeton keeps Gout’s media and commercial commitments to an absolute minimum. Adidas are his only sponsor, though not because of a lack of interest.
‘We’ve had a number of offers but we’ve not been in a hurry to accept,’ explains Templeton. ‘I firmly believe that there will be no less demand for him in six months or a year.’
Few would disagree, especially given how his fame could explode after the World Championships. It is worth remembering, however, that a 17-year-old Bolt crashed out in the first round of the 200m on his senior championships debut at the 2004 Olympics.
Ex-British sprinter Darren Campbell says the comparisons between Gout and Bolt are genuine
‘History has a funny way of repeating itself,’ says Campbell, who won 200m silver at Sydney 2000 and gold in the 4x100m relay at Athens 2004. ‘Once you go into the senior ranks, it’s a lot different.
‘The hardest bit is going from winning all the time to finishing fourth, fifth, sixth. That is the very difficult part of the journey because it’s a new experience you are having to deal with.
‘If I take myself back to being an athlete at Athens, Bolt had already run under 20 and I hadn’t, but my mindset was, “He can’t beat me”. That’s what the likes of Lyles will be thinking.
’But it wouldn’t surprise me if he makes the world final because every challenge that has gone in front of him thus far, he’s excelled. So far this season, he has been extremely consistent, which means that under the right environment, the times will only get quicker.’
Standing at 6ft 2in, Gout is three inches shorter than Bolt. But he runs with the same long, fluid strides and high, powerful knee lift as the Olympic legend, and shares his reputation as a relatively slow starter who surges away in the back half of the race. Such is the smoothness and ease of his motion, Gout appears to float over the track – a quality once regularly attributed to Bolt.
Campbell, now head of sprints and relays at UK Athletics, has closely studied Gout’s technique and believes he has pinpointed what makes him truly special.
‘It’s his contact times on the ground,’ says the 51-year-old. ‘He literally just touches the ground and reacts off it. The actual time that his foot is spending on the ground is minimal.
‘He’s got good technique, good stride length, good cadence, but I think all of that stems from the contact times that he’s able to generate.’
Standing at 6ft 2in, Gout is three inches shorter than Bolt. But he runs with the same long, fluid strides and high, powerful knee lift
And still, there is room for improvement. Campbell notes Gout’s lateral sway – the side-to-side movement of the upper body, which can waste energy and reduce speed. But he believes Gout will be able to minimise that ‘rock’, and boost his speed out of the blocks, once he is fully developed.
Currently, Gout weighs only around 10st 8lb and his slender frame again resembles that of a teenage Bolt, who bulked up to weigh 14st 11lb in his prime.
‘If you go back and watch a video of Bolt back in the day, he hadn’t built that core strength yet either,’ adds Campbell. ‘But for someone so young, Gout’s still got a solid technique.
‘Because of the way he runs, the last part of his race will always be the best part of his race. But once he adds power, then he will have more power out of the blocks.
‘He is able to maintain speed and decelerate at a slower rate than everybody else, which is what Bolt was able to do because of his height and stride length. Once he gets into his rhythm, he will be very difficult to beat.’
Gout is unlikely to be beaten on Friday night. Rather than taking on the top dogs in the main Diamond League show in Monaco, he will run in an Under-23 race on the pre-programme. That decision was taken by Templeton, who wanted his client to experience the event but in a low-key fashion. He would, though, be able to take home prize money as a professional athlete. Gout will then be taken out of the spotlight altogether, with no races planned until he takes to the world stage in Tokyo.
Longer term, Gout is targeting the next Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028
Next year, he could represent Australia at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, although he may choose to prioritise the World Junior Championships in Oregon a few days later.
Longer term, Gout is targeting the next Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. But the ‘end goal’, as Gout himself has put it, is his home Games in 2032, when he is destined to be the poster boy of Brisbane – the equivalent of Cathy Freeman at Sydney 2000.
‘I am incredibly excited about the next decade,’ adds Templeton. ‘I have a strong sense there is a lot more to come. He is just warming up.’
