It’s 2002, and a 6’5″ Jamaican teenager has just become the youngest world junior gold medalist in history. Twenty-four years later, Usain Bolt is the fastest man who ever lived, but for six years, between 15 and 21, the parties and missed training sessions nearly derailed it all. Now he’s watching his successor closely, making sure history doesn’t repeat itself.

Bolt, like Gout Gout, showed huge promise as a teenager. At the age of 15, he had stunned the world, and continued to do that throughout his teens. But while he kept breaking records, Bolt also skipped training and instead dedicated most of his time to his social life. That is something he hopes won’t happen to the Australian, who just broke his U20 record in the 200m.

“At that young age, because I was there, you start getting put left and right and then you forget track and field,” Bolt told CNN Sports.

“Hopefully, he has the right set of people to guide him and keep him focused on track and field because the rest of the stuff will always be there. But if you mess up on track and field, then it all goes away.”

Although to be fair to Gout Gout, he has been laser-focused. The 18-year-old struggled at the 2025 Tokyo World Championships, his only major senior meet. He exited in the semi-finals with a time of 20.36, finishing well behind 200m Olympic champion Letsile Tebogo (19.95). The teenage phenom then skipped the indoor season and has since steadily improved in the 200m.

Just in 2026, Gout Gout has clocked 20.42 in mid-March, then rapidly reduced it to 19.67 (+1.7) at the Australian Championships in mid-April. The latter broke Usain Bolt’s U20 record (19.93 back in 2004) and set the U20 world record at the same time. While it is yet to be ratified, Gout then went and won the Australian U20 Championships in the 100m with 10.21.

There he finished well ahead of his competition yet again, as Zavier Peacock registered 10.35 for second place while Uwezo Lubenda clocked 10.37 for third. Now, the 18-year-old travels to participate in his first senior meets and make his senior Diamond League debut. That’ll happen at the Bislett Games in Oslo, and it’ll be the biggest meet Gout Gout will participate in since the 2025 worlds.

And Bolt knows that whatever happens at that meet, it’ll change how Gout Gout sees the sport.

“I know it’s going to be an eye-opener,” Bolt explained. “And I hope it doesn’t get him down, but motivate him to work even harder.”

“I think in the first year you will learn a lot and understand what you need to do to be better,” he added.

Few sprinters know what Gout will go through better than Usain Bolt. The now 39-year-old also struggled in his first few years as a professional sprinter. Injuries did play their role, but so did inconsistent performances, as Bolt failed to live up to his hype. He even exited in the first round at the 2004 Olympics but vowed to make a comeback.

A new coach in Glen Mills and a new regimen were set to help make it happen. But it took him time to adjust. Hamstring and ankle injuries, alongside a car accident, didn’t help his case, and it meant he didn’t earn a medal until 2006. That year proved big for Bolt, as he earned bronze medals at the 2006 Athletissima Grand Prix and the IAAF World Athletics Final.

“For me, [moving to seniors was] so big, it’s totally different,” Bolt admitted. “I remember coming out of high school, going on the circuit, I felt like I was on top of the world because I also was winning and running good, and when I got on the circuit, I didn’t win one race.”

And much like Usain Bolt, Carl Lewis also echoed similar advice to Gout Gout, telling the teenager to take things easy.

Carl Lewis warns Gout Gout about the hype

Gout Gout has enjoyed a rapid ascent since making its debut. So much so that, while he’s run mostly in junior competitions, the results have been hard to ignore. Aside from breaking the U16 Australian records in the 100m and 200m, and the U20 world record in the 200m, he has also won consistently. That is at the junior level, winning 13 races in a row from November 2024 to March 2025 in the 200m.

Not only that, but he also won fifteen consecutive races in the 60m from March to July 2024, six consecutive 100m races from November to December 2023. The hype around Gout Gout has only grown since, and his latest records have only added to that. It’s likely why, in mid-2025, Carl Lewis offered the young sprint phenom some advice, as a former teenage phenom.

“I’d tell him not to let the hype take it too fast,” Lewis told Olympics.com. “Fortunately, I made teams, I made my Pan Am team, I made the Olympic team at 18, but it still allowed me, being a long jumper in a time when the media was different, to just kind of go at a pace that was age-appropriate.”

“I think the big thing is that we’ve seen this movie so many times with young athletes having such success, and then we just forget; they just fade away. So the biggest thing is don’t rush it,” Lewis added.

As Usain Bolt and Carl Lewis have both warned, the spotlight will only get brighter for Gout Gout. The real test now is whether he can stay focused long enough to live up to it.