Gout’s rival had one advantage over him. So the 18-year-old went to work

Lachie Kennedy didn’t stop Gout-mania, but he did stop Gout Gout. The sprinter crashed the Gout party by beating him at last year’s Maurie Plant event in Melbourne.

Losing once to Kennedy at the biggest athletics meeting in the country is one thing, but for it to happen over Gout’s pet 200m two years in a row would be a pattern. And at the very least an unwelcome one for Gout.

“We are good mates, but I am excited to run it back. This is our second race after last year, so I am excited to get to go again. It’s going to be a good race, me and him,” Gout said ahead of the Maurie Plant Meet at Lakeside Stadium on Saturday night.

“I feel like it’s a great rivalry knowing we have two of our best sprinters in Australia running against one another in one of the biggest meets in Australia. It’s definitely great.

“One hundred per cent I have got a lot stronger from last year and my start has got a lot faster as you can see with my 10 [seconds] flat in my season opener [for the 100m] so it’s definitely gotten a lot better and I can’t wait to see.”

Last year Gout was a novelty attraction as the schoolboy phenomenon, but now he returns as an 18-year-old, no longer a schoolboy, but an athlete who held his own against the world’s quickest men when he made the semi-finals at last year’s world championships in Tokyo.

All last year he carried the pressure to back up his All Schools record-breaking runs, and prove they were not flukes. He did that. Now he carries a different sort of pressure as the biggest name not only in Australian athletics as but a fascination to the rest of the world.

“Definitely there’s a bit of pressure with that but knowing me I love running, and I have just got to do the best I can and going out there and knowing it’s a new year, new race, and it’s a new competition. So go out there, keep an open mindset and still head for that win,” he said.

After a promising 10 seconds flat for the 100m in the opening race of the season at a tiny Queensland event he set himself to have a serious crack at breaking records at the Queensland State Championships a week ago. He picked up a head cold in the week leading in, which thwarted any ideas of doing something special.

“All clear, all healthy. Ready to rock and roll, I feel good,” he said on Thursday at Albert Park.

Meanwhile, one of the curiosities of the night is not who will be at the track as much as who won’t.

Jessica Hull, who won 1500m silver and bronze in the 3000m at the world indoors in Poland a week ago has chosen not to compete in Melbourne but the woman who beat her and won gold, Briton Georgia Hunter Bell, will.

Hunter Bell, and a slew of Australian athletes, got straight on planes after the world indoors to be at Australia’s biggest domestic meet. But Hull has chosen not to be in Melbourne, reportedly out of frustration at a perceived lack of support from Athletics Australia.

“Jess is honestly on the road all the time [and] she is racing all the time. She is probably one of the hardest working people in track and field, so I think she probably wants a week off before she has to come back and do it again, and obviously, she doubled at world champs already. So it’s fair enough she wants a week of no racing,” Hunter Bell said.

“She has really set the bar over the past few years for going after [Kenyan champion] Faith Kipyegon and showing the rest of the field that we should be doing the same, and now I think it will be a really interesting year in the 1500 because we know Faith will be featuring a little bit less. I think she potentially is doing some more of the longer stuff which makes it a little more exciting for us.”

Meantime, Olympic pole vault champion Nina Kennedy will return to serious competition at the Maurie Plant Meet.

After a year wrecked by injury and surgery, Kennedy said she felt ready to attack the event after a patient recovery.

Kennedy smashed her body to try to be fit in time for the world championships last year but succumbed to injury again.

“I did Perth track classic, that was a bronze meet, and I kind of dipped my toe back in the water, but here I can’t hide from anything,” she said.

Kennedy said 2005 was “really, really hard. I thought it was going to be huge, and I just wanted to keep that ball rolling and jump higher and do really cool things so it definitely humbled me and brought me back to the baseline.

“In my gut it says I am going to be a better athlete for it. I am jumping really high. At the Perth Track Classic I did jump a personal best off that run up and things are trending in the right direction.”

News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.