About five years ago, well before the night he held off a rapidly finishing Gout Gout to announce himself to Australia, Lachie Kennedy was cannoning down a rugby field when he first left a crowd watching on stunned.
“There was a bit of a play down the right-hand side and he was just off and gone,” Tyron Mandrusiak, the long-time director of rugby at Brisbane’s St Joseph’s College, Gregory Terrace, recalls to Wide World of Sports.
Kennedy, speaking to WWOS ahead of this week’s national athletics championships, remembers the play vividly.
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“Someone chips the ball over, my mate with a torn calf catches it, he’s about to fall over, he passes it out the back, and I swing around and end up running around everyone to score,” Kennedy remembers.
It was a length-of-the-field try, giving those looking on at The Southport School on the Gold Coast, including a wide-eyed Mandrusiak, a tick over 10 seconds to watch the kid, in year 10 at the time, at full flight.
“That was by far my greatest play. I get goosebumps thinking about it,” Kennedy beams.
“Bang. Off he went. That was it,” says Mandrusiak.
“No one was catching him.”
Lachlan Kennedy (right) edges Gout Gout to win the 200 metres at the Maurie Plant Meet in Melbourne. Getty
In the 200 metres at Melbourne’s Maurie Plant Meet late last month, the script had Gout catching him.
Kennedy, a world indoor championship silver medallist in the 60m, would explode out of the blocks, career into the straight with the lead, and in a desperate struggle for the line be mowed down by his younger rival, as per the script.
As fate would have it, the script writers got everything right bar the conclusion.
Kennedy, a blisteringly fast starter, staved off his 17-year-old rival — Gout’s Achilles heel is his cumbersome start — to win by four hundredths of a second.
The spectacular race, witnessed by some 10,000 people at Lakeside Stadium and another 1.2 million on prime-time TV, has set the scene for a mouthwatering rematch at the national championships in Perth.
Kennedy is honing in on the championships with bold ambitions. Not only does the 21-year-old want to prove his win against Gout wasn’t just a one-off, he wants to crack the 10-second barrier in the 100m and the 20-second mark in the 200m.
In fact, he wants to break the Australian record in the 100m, the 9.93 set by Patrick Johnson in Japan in 2003, and the national record in the 200m, the 20.04 produced by Gout at the age of just 16 in Brisbane last December.
Gout Gout congratulates Lachlan Kennedy on his win. Getty
Johnson remains the only Aussie to have broken the 10-second barrier in the 100m in legal wind conditions.
The only Aussie who’s cracked the 20-second mark in the 200m is Gout, albeit with a wind at his back too gusty to be legal.
Gout will run the 100m at the national championships, but in the under-20 division. He, too, is a realistic chance of shattering the 10-second barrier.
Speaking to WWOS over the phone, Kennedy spells out his goals with an air of confidence.
But there’s not a hint of arrogance; instead, a tantalising sense of unwavering self-belief.
“I think it’s a matter of time [that I break the 10-second mark]. Either heat, semi or final [at the championships], at one point it’ll go, for sure,” says Kennedy, who in Perth last month clocked 10.03 with a legal wind of +1.1 metres per second at his back.
“The focus is the 100m. I’m going there to run sub-10 and get the Australian record in the 100m, and then if I’m feeling up to it I’ll do the 200m as well.
“I also really, really want to win the 200m and I want to go sub-20 for the 200m.
“I want to run 19 seconds [in the 200m] and nine seconds [in the 100m] … That would be dope. I reckon I can do it.
“The body feels great and I’m just running with so much confidence.”
Kennedy in Melbourne. Getty
Kennedy’s coach, Andrew Iselin, is just as confident that he’ll bust the 10-second barrier this week.
“He will, one-hundred per cent,” Iselin tells WWOS.
“I would be surprised if he didn’t.”
Asked about his background in sprinting and rugby, Kennedy replies in fitting fashion.
“I’ll give you a quick rundown,” the speedster says.
In a nutshell, he played rugby from the under-sixes until the end of year 12. Unsurprisingly, he was a winger.
“You wouldn’t have thought he was going to play for the Wallabies,” Mandrusiak says, “but he certainly had speed, and if he ever got the ball in space he was very hard to catch.”
He dabbled in sprinting across late primary school and early high school, gave it up for a few years, and returned to the track in year 11.
Kennedy in action in school rugby for Brisbane’s St Joseph’s College, Gregory Terrace. Supplied
“I was playing footy just socially at the start [of year 11], and then I got moved up to the seconds and the coach of that team was like, ‘Hey, you’re pretty fast. You should go run track for the school’,” Kennedy recalls.
“I ended up running 10.51 in September of year 12, and I was like, ‘Wow, I’m really decent at this running thing’.
“Once I finished school I was like, ‘[Should I get serious about] footy or track? I think I’m better at track’.
“And once you get a taste for being fast and winning races, you don’t want to stop.”
Anthony Hayward ran the track and field program at Gregory Terrace when Kennedy returned to sprinting.
“I remember thinking, ‘It’s awesome to watch him run and he’s definitely got a bright future if he persists’,” Hayward recalls to WWOS.
“He was an impressive runner … He was a surprise.”
Kennedy in his school rugby colours. Supplied
Iselin, a sprint coach at Gregory Terrace, first crossed paths with Kennedy when the Brisbane schoolboy returned to athletics in year 11.
“We knew he was fast, but you come across fast rugby players all the time,” Iselin says.
“But when he actually took that next step in year 12, you knew he had something special.”
And he’s a coach’s dream.
“Nice kid, chill,” Iselin says.
“He is really trainable, he latches onto everything.
“Rugby players are generally a bit tougher than sprinters … He’s a tough trainer. You’ve just got to hold him back sometimes.
“But you see so much talent come through and they don’t have the same level of commitment.”
Kennedy celebrates clinching silver in the 60 metres at the world indoor championships in China in March. Getty
Kennedy made his Olympic debut in Paris eight months ago, as a member of the 4x100m relay team, but this year is proving his breakthrough year.
In Canberra in January, he clocked 6.43 seconds in the 60m to claim the national record previously held by sprint great Matt Shirvington.
In the Chinese city of Nanjing in March, he bagged silver in the 60m at the world indoors, albeit at a championships missing 60m world record holder Christian Coleman and reigning 100m Olympic champion Noah Lyles. The gold medallist in China, Great Britain’s Jeremiah Azu, pipped him by just one hundredth of a second.
Then in Melbourne later in March, taking on Gout in the teen sensation’s pet event, came his boilover triumph.
“Gout had already proven himself a top-quality athlete,” Kennedy’s agent, Nic Bideau, tells WWOS.
“But now we have two of them; not just one.
“We’ve got this bloke Kennedy.”
