Australian Athletics Championship: Gout Gout, Leah O’Brien and Torrie Lewis lead the new wave at Perth meet

Perth has found itself at the eye of a perfect sporting storm. A host of the country’s new celebrity sprinters — including smiling track assassin Gout Gout and a breakout West Australian star — will bring in the dawn of a golden track and field era at WA Athletics Stadium this week. The most anticipated Australian Athletics Championships in years kicks off in Perth on Thursday. It’s a meet that will bridge the generation gap between the heroes of last year’s Olympics and a remarkable crop of superstars of the future. At the vanguard of the new sport’s brave new world in Australia stand two teenage sprinters — one boasting a highlight reel which somehow grows with every run, the other an overnight sensation from Perth — who have broken long-standing underage national records. But while Gout Gout and WA youngster Leah O’Brien have garnered recent headlines, they are not the only talented young guns on the blocks this weekend, with Lachie Kennedy and Torrie Lewis having also clocked blistering times at tender ages. Even that quartet is just the tip of the iceberg on show this weekend; dual Olympic silver medallist Nicola Olyslagers will go head-to head with Paris bronze medal-winner Eleanor Patterson in the high jump and Paris 2024 runner-up Jessica Hull heads the field in the 1500m. Meanwhile, WA-based Kurtis Marschall will hold court in the pole vault after finishing sixth at last year’s Olympics. Before the senior championships even started this week, it was local girl O’Brien who stole the show when she broke another long-standing record by besting Raelene Boyle’s 57-year-old under-18 100m benchmark during the junior The Perth College schoolgirl shaved 0.06 off the time with a run of 11.14, the fourth-quickest run ever by an Australian woman and just 0.04 off the national record set by Lewis — who O’Brien will rub shoulders with this weekend in the open 100m on Friday and Saturday. “I didn’t even realise I broke the record, because I actually didn’t know what the record was; I never even planned on breaking it,” O’Brien told The West Australian. “I knew what our state record was because I really wanted to break that, but I never imagined I’d break the national record.” O’Brien’s time also equalled Olympic champion Sally Pearson’s best time for a 100m sans-hurdles. “It is so weird to think about because a few years ago, I would always look up to her and I’d be like, ‘wow, she is so fast’; I could never imagine one day, sharing a personal best time with her,” O’Brien said. Pearson’s victory at the London 2012 games remains the gold standard for Australian athletics on the track, alongside Cathy Freeman’s iconic 400m run in front of an adoring crowd at her home Olympics in 2000. As Channel Seven broadcaster and doyen of Australian athletics commentary Bruce McAvaney put it, this week’s national meet had an air of excitement around it previous iterations had not possessed. “We’re riding a bit of a wave and it’s culminating in the most anticipated national championships in recent times,” McAvaney told The West Australian. “It’s almost unprecedented, the interest in the sport right now away from maybe a year out from an Olympic Games — this far out, I can’t remember much more general interest than we’re having right now from most people that are not rusted-on track and field fans.” Most of the attention in the build-up has been centered around the aforementioned Gout as he prepares to contest the under-20 100m on Thursday and the 200m on Sunday. The 17 year-old’s reputation proceeds him, having gone viral for a show-reel of races notable for competitors trailing forlornly in the wake of the Queenslander. Gout attracted the attention of not just the country, but the fastest man of all-time Usain Bolt when he beat the Jamaican’s under-age 200m time when he clocked a blistering 20.04 in December. It was a time which lowered Peter Norman’s almost 50-year-old Australian under-18 record and has punters rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of a Sunday showdown with Kennedy, who bested Gout in the 200m at the Maurie Plant Meet last month. The Olympics remain the final frontier for glory on the track and field; it is what consolidated the legends of Freeman and Pearson and the Brisbane 2032 Olympics are slowly but surely appearing on the horizon. It was that dangling carrot of a home Olympics, the chance to fulfill lifelong dreams and maybe even create their own Freeman moment, that McAvaney believed would spur the next generation on to greater heights. “If you’re any track and field athlete in Australia right now and you’re under the age of 30, and even some that might be over because of the field events, you’re thinking ‘I can get to Brisbane,’” he said. “There’s a great golden goal down the stretch with Los Angeles in between, plus Commonwealth Games still going, World Championships and a season in Australia that’s now making sense with the big meetings. “All these things coming together, a good coaching program, the coaches becoming even better qualified, a good high performance director, a president of Athletics Australia (former heptathlete Jane Fleming) who’s well-known, very enthusiastic and ambitious. “Success breeds success and now we arrive here in 2025 and we’ve got a Brisbane Olympics seven years away.” For the likes of O’Brien, Brisbane is definitely on the radar, even if the end of high school is far closer at the current moment. “I still have a long way to go my athletic career, a lot of work to put in,” she said. “If I put in the hard work, and I do what I can do, hopefully I can get there. It’s a big dream of mine to hopefully represent Australia at the Olympics one day.” Down the line, there will be bigger fish to fry for the likes of Gout, O’Brien, Lewis and Kennedy, who no doubt have hopes building on their promising foundations and emulating the legends of the sport. They have already turned heads before they have even put spikes onto track — not neccessarily of who they are now, but what they might become. But for now, there is this week in Perth; the chance to write the opening chapters of their stories in pen rather than pencil. And by extension, it gives locals the chance to see the stars of tomorrow, today. “We’re on the precipice of a really great weekend of high class athletics in a city that really loves their athletics,” McAvaney said. “Perth has got good conditions for some fast times the whole of Australia will be certainly, if not watching live, wanting to know the results. “For Western Australia, for the city, for the country, it’s a good time.”