Right, I’ll be honest — I don’t usually get swept up in athletics. It’s not that I don’t appreciate it, I just tend to follow it the way most Australians do: vaguely, every four years, when the Olympics rolls around and suddenly everyone’s an expert. But this week, something genuinely extraordinary happened, and I’ve been down a rabbit hole of YouTube clips and Wikipedia tabs ever since.

Gout Gout — an 18-year-old kid — just ran the 200 metres in under 20 seconds. Not just under 20 seconds, but 19.84 seconds, smashing both the Australian national record and the U20 world record. Let that sink in for a moment. Peter Norman’s national record had stood since 1968. Fifty-six years. That’s older than me. And Gout didn’t just nudge it — he obliterated it.