An unenviable draw and his struggle to get out of the blocks will almost certainly end the debut of Gout Gout at the world championships in his semi-final on Thursday, but the teenager remains upbeat about his prospects having survived his first major international test.
The Australian overcame a ponderous first 30m to finish third in his heat in 20.23sec, the 12th fastest time across all qualifiers for the semis.
Given eight athletes will progress to the final, Gout might be considered a chance, especially given he cruised through the final 50m of his heat.
He has stated his ambition for the meet is to break the 20-second barrier. He ran 19.84sec in April, but with a 2.2m/s tailwind the time was scratched from the records, and his personal best is the 20.02sec he ran in Czechia in June.
“Sub-20, that’s the goal, so let’s see in the semi,” Gout said. “Just go out there, run like a horse, run like the wind.”
His hopes of progressing have been hampered by what appears to be, like football’s group of death, a semi-final of suffering.
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Only two will qualify directly for the final, with another two across all three semis going through based on fastest times. Of the nine athletes in Gout’s heat, five have run sub-20, and four of those have come this season.
Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo and Bryan Levell – who easily beat the Australian in the heats and last month set a PB of 19.69sec – will give Gout a first-hand demonstration of how much improvement is needed in coming years before the 17-year-old can compete for medals in the 200m.
Gout described Levell as “fast” to Channel Nine after the race. “He took off very fast and he held it, so congratulations to him,” he said.
Levell had made up the stagger on Gout midway around the bend, and the teenager’s splits show just how slow he was getting out of the blocks. At the 30m mark, World Athletics timing had him placed last in the heat.
To recover and comfortably run 20.23sec highlights Gout’s top-end speed. But even before he turned on cruise control down the straight, he was struggling to make up ground on Levell or second-place Zimbabwean Makanakaishe Charamba.
“I’ve just got to take the experience into the semi-finals,” Gout said. “Hopefully I get a good start, and then I’m off like a butterfly.”
With his forehead dripping in the Tokyo humidity, the teenager said after the race he tried to remind himself to stay calm.
“Like, this is what you do every day, you train, you do blocks every day, you do speed workouts every day, so it is just another training session,” he told SBS.
“Even though this is the biggest stage in the world, you’ve just got to go out there, treat it like a training session.”
Having been in Tokyo since last Friday, Gout said he had felt the expectation building ahead of Wednesday’s performance, but he is trying to enjoy himself.
“Obviously, there’s going to be expectation wherever I go, so it is what it is, and I’ve just got to go out there and do my thing and have a bit of fun.”
Gout has already done something even the great Usain Bolt couldn’t and progress beyond his first heat at his first major international meet.
Bolt was eliminated in the first round of the 200m at the 2004 Athens Olympics at age 18, serving as a reminder that Gout’s potential remains immense, whatever the semi-final result.
The Australian played down the comparison with the Jamaican.
“I just got out of the [heat] so it is definitely great to know that I’m up against the top 24 in the world, it’s a great experience,” the Australian said, calling Bolt “the goat”, slang for the greatest of all time.
“He’s the athlete everyone looks up to, so I’m just going to keep looking up to him and trying to be like him, too.”
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