Rising athletics star Gout Gout recently set another record as his extraordinary rise in the sport continued - and legendary sprinter Usain Bolt once gave the teenager some key indirect advice as his career progresses.
The 17-year-old has set a new Australian record after he won the 200m on his senior international athletics debut.
He emerged victorious at the Golden Spike meeting in Ostrava, Czech Republic, with a time of 20.02 seconds on his maiden appearance in Europe in what was a dream first outing.
The time Gout ran took him within only two hundredths of a second of running a time below 20 seconds.
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Parallels have been drawn between the youngster and legendary Olympian Bolt, who is regarded by many as the greatest sprinter of all time.
The 38-year-old won a remarkable eight gold medals across three Olympic Games in the 100m and 200m to cement his credentials as the GOAT.
Bolt claimed gold in both the 100m and 200m in his first Olympics at Beijing 2008.
The Jamaican then competed at London 2012 to win gold in both events once again, as well as being part of the victorious 4x100m Jamaican relay team to take his tally to five.
And he achieved another clean sweep in the same three events four years later at Rio 2016 to take his tally to an extraordinary eight Olympic golds.
Bolt ran the 200m in sub 20 seconds in April 2004 when he was also 17, and Gout's current time which he ran in the Czech Republic is is 0.83 seconds behind Bolt's world record 200m time of 19.19 seconds, which was set at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.
Bolt, who retired from sprinting in 2017, indirectly gave Gout some advice last year when he spoke on the High Performance Podcast with Jake Humphrey as he reflected on his younger days as a sprinter.
Bolt said: "When I started out, I didn't understand the concept of 'being great' because I was young.
"I was 15 when I won the world juniors, I was really young and I was really talented so I didn't have to work as hard as it was just talent, as I was winning and winning.
"I remember when I got to the professional level, and I felt like it was just going to be easy.
"And I got to the stage where I would go to meets and I would lose. And I was like, 'This is strange, this is new'. So it took me a while to understand."
Topics: Athletics, Olympics, Usain Bolt, Gout Gout
John McDougall