As Australian sprint prodigy Gout Gout looks to shorten his times on the track, he is getting taller by the day.
Gout’s coach Di Sheppard has noticed a significant change ahead of the 17-year-old sprinter’s 2025 World Athletics Championships debut this month.
“When we got out of the car and were walking in the airport, I turned around and I felt like I had to look up more. I looked at him and went, ‘you’ve grown’. He looked at me like, ‘yeah, right’,” Sheppard said.
“I’ve never been wrong yet – even when mothers tell me they haven’t, I tell them to go home and measure their kid.”
Gout is now 1.83m, almost 3cm taller than last year, meaning the star who has been compared to the legendary Usain Bolt – who is 1.95m – could yet reach new heights.
And that could soon mean tailoring his training, although Sheppard is cautious about introducing strength work to Gout’s regime.
“We’ll move into that when we can add that with some power, so it’s not about really trying to force it, because, I mean, he’s 17 and he’s still growing,” Gout added.
“It’s a step-by-step-by-step process, so when you hit one mark, [you say] ‘OK, we’ve got those, we can get out of the blocks in our first two steps’. We know his top end speed’s there, but you don’t drop that to work on this, you gradually improve this [his start] to match that [his speed].”
Gout boasts a personal best of 10.17 seconds in the 100m and 20.02 in the 200m.