Gout Gout and his coach Di Sheppard have given an insight into the relationship behind the record-breaking rising star of Australian athletics.
Gout once again blew the world away after smashing his own national 200m record in Sydney last month.
His time of 19.67sec was faster than the time Usain Bolt ran at the same age would have been good enough to win bronze at the Paris Olympics.
Countless clips of Gout have gone viral on social media, earning comparisons to Bolt. Now the 18-year-old Australian has been profiled by America’s 60 Minutes as the world gets to know our next big thing.
The CBS program unpacks the dynamic between Gout and Sheppard, who quit her job at a supermarket to become the sprint coach at Ipswich Grammar School before discovering Gout in the playground.
“I looked at him and just went ‘Oh my god’,” Sheppard recalled of the first time she saw Gout run.
“Gut punch, it was just like this kid’s the real deal. I was talking to the junior school headmaster and I said, ‘Watch I’m going to make him a champion’ He thought I was mucking around.”
60 Minutes reporter Jon Wertheim described Sheppard as a “grouchy grandma”.
“If you worry all the hype is enough to inflate the ego of a teenager, don’t,” Wertheim says in the program.
“Note the woman in the visor. This grouchy grandma is about to break up all the fun, that’s Di Sheppard, Gout’s coach, the only one he’s ever had.”
Gout has become a household name in Australia and the hype train is starting to take off worldwide, while endorsement deals from Adidas and Vegemite show Gout’s commercial pulling power.
“I don’t like the attention. It’s not my cup of tea,” Sheppard said.
“Gout handles it totally different to me but good cop, bad cop.”
Asked if she is worried about the money and fame starting to follow Gout, Sheppard said: “I think the only time we’ll have trouble is if it’s girl that I don’t like.
She chuckled: “I’d go to (Gout’s) mum, ‘She’s gotta go!”
“People would be scared of because she’s ‘cranky’, people say,” Gout said of his first encounter with Sheppard when she asked him to come to athletics training at school.
“Me being a 12 or 13-year-old kid, I’m like, ‘Am I getting in trouble? What’s going on?’
She calls me over and she’s like, ‘You should come to track and field training.”
Gout added: “It’s a pretty crazy dynamic when you think about it. The old white lady and the young black kid, you know.
“It’s a crazy dynamic but turns out it works perfectly and I wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s straight out of a movie. Our personalities filter off each other. It’s a great relationship.”
Sheppard and manager James Templeton are carefully managing Gout’s transition to the senior ranks, choosing to stay in Brisbane instead of send him to the college system.
Gout will skip the Commonwealth Games but he has his sights set on the World Junior Championships in Oregon in August, where he will look to go one better than the silver medal he won in 2024.
“You want to run as fast as possible but you don’t want to overload as a teenager because then that messes up the rest of your career,” Gout said.
“You just increase the intensity as his body matures … he will just naturally start to go quicker as the body develops, brain develops, everything ties in,” Sheppard added.
“Our biggest and weakest thing is his starts, but that’s a physical thing … he doesn’t have full control of the limbs, they’re not fully synced yet.
“He’s got so much more physical development. He only really hit puberty in the last 12 to 18 months basically. I had to deal with a lot of growth issues with Gout. When I met Gout he walked right up on his heels, took me six months to get the heel down.”
As for quickly becoming one of the country’s most recognisable athletes, Gout said: “I don’t like to call it fame. I call it well-known in the wider community.
“I don’t really use the word famous. Just well known.”
Bolt told CNN last month he hoped Gout had the “right people” around him to help steer the teenager on the path from prodigy to global superstardom.
“He’s a young talent, he’s a massive young talent,” the eight-time Olympic gold medallist said.
“I just hope he find the right people. It’s so big to transition, to have the right people to watch you because at that young age, because I was there, you start getting pulled left and right, and then you forget track and field.
“Hopefully, he has the right set of people who actually help guide him and keep him focused on track and field.“The rest of the stuff will always be there. But if you mess up on track, then it all goes away.”
