Topics: Athletics, Jamaica, Usain Bolt, Gout Gout, Noah Lyles
Usain Bolt has made his feelings clear on potentially losing his 100-metre world record to Australian sprint sensation Gout Gout.
Bolt's world record, a time of 9.58 seconds set at the 2009 World Athletics Championships in Berlin, has never come close to being beaten by another competitor in the past 15 years.
The fastest man in the world right now, Noah Lyles, ran a personal best time of 9.79 to win the 100m final at Paris 2024, while Bolt's compatriot Oblique Seville ran 9.81 in the heats and has been tipped to potentially go even quicker.
But significant attention within the athletics world has been placed on Gout, who turned 17 in December.
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He went viral on social media after running a record-breaking time of 10.29 seconds to win the Under-18 boys' 100-metre event at the Queensland Athletics Championships last March.
Gout has since improved that personal best time to a 10.17.
On Wednesday, meanwhile, the 17-year-old twice went under 10 seconds at the Australian Athletics Championships, running 9.99 in one of his heats and then the final.
Gout ran the times in 'illegal' tailwinds - above the 2.0m/s legal limit - meaning the times won't count towards the record books.
But he has already been compared to Bolt and is tipped to be one of the leading stars of athletics in the years to come.
The Jamaican has previously made his feelings clear on potentially losing his 100m world record after over 15 years.
In 2008, Bolt won Olympic gold in the 4x100m relay with Jamaica, and ended his career with nine gold medals.
But that relay gold was stripped from him nine years later, after team-mate Nesta Carter was suspended from athletics for a doping sanction.
Traces of the banned stimulant methylexanamine were found in Carter's A and B samples in 2016, with the samples having been retested from the 2008 Olympics.
Speaking after the announcement that the team had been stripped of the medal, Bolt said he was 'disappointed' on an individual level but stated that it did not make him any less proud of his career in athletics - appearing to indicate that he would feel the same way if a world record was taken from him.
"I am disappointed based on losing a medal," he told AFP. "But it won't take away from what I have done throughout my career, because I have won my individual events and that's the key thing.
"What can you do? I've done all I wanted in the sport, I have really impacted the sport, I've really accomplished a lot, so for me, I can't complain."
