Aidan Murphy had just done something no Australian had ever done – except the bloke who did it 0.21 seconds before him.
Murphy, the overlooked man of Australia’s new sprint generation, broke 20 seconds for the 200 metres at the nationals earlier this year. He would have been the first – not even Gout Gout had run a legal time under 20s.
But in that same race, the Queensland teenager breasted the line a fraction of a second ahead of Murphy. So Murphy’s extraordinary effort of 19.88s became slightly less extraordinary, and lost in the dizzying Gout hoopla.
“It’s hard to comprehend when you do it [run sub-20] but you have still got someone out in front of you. What I had done hit a lot later, I think,” Murphy said.
“It was one of those times where it was like ‘shit, I just did that’. You know what I mean? And then now, how do you replicate that? So I think that’s kind of what basically my whole team has been focusing on, and you know why we’re here.”
The assumption afterwards was that Gout’s appearance in the race helped drag Murphy to his sub-20 time.
“I think it’s pretty easy to think that as well, but we went back through the data and it was actually the other way around,” Murphy said.
“I was the one pushing Gout. So I guess it was one of those things where we were both just there at the right time. More than, you know, one of us getting over the line first.
“He definitely had that top speed advantage over me in that last 50. I don’t think there was ever a moment where I was like, ‘Yep, I’ve got this in the bag’, because nature of sprinting is you never know who’s going to win ’til the finish line.”
Murphy explained his confidence going into that race, with his times in training and in competitions running into big headwinds.
“We had been quietly sitting on a very big time drop for a lot of months,” he said.
“We were ready to drop something big.”
Murphy has been a 400m runner, so was not in the conversation along with another Australian sprint star, Lachie Kennedy, and Gout for the 200m. But he ran it at nationals and broke 20s, and he will run it in Glasgow where there is no 400m race on the card.
The field is strong in Glasgow, although the Cayman Islands didn’t send an athletics team, so the US college champion Jaiden Reid won’t be in the field. Reid is the world-leading runner this year for the 200m, having clocked 19.66s.
Still, there will be two other sub-20 runners with personal bests better than Murphy’s, one of them South Africa’s Sinesipho Dembile, who has run a 19.74s.
“You have to put times out of your head and just run the race. That was my exact mentality going into nationals. On paper, I shouldn’t have been anywhere near Gout, and yet I was. How did that happen? Because you need to flip a switch in your brain to get you to run the times you need to be able to run to be competitive, and that is exactly what I will do at Glasgow. It’s just another faster guy at this point. It’s just another Gout.
“I think we can do something special here.”
Murphy’s mum is the former sprinter Tania Van Heer, a two-time Commonwealth Games gold medallist and sounding board for her son as he navigates his breakout run and first Commonwealth Games.
“It has been good having her around training and competitions more regularly now more than ever.
“It has been pretty stabilising for me where I’ve had a breakout, and you sort of almost get lost in where your ceiling is.
“There’s always going to be a bit of competitive rivalry between us about who has more international medals, which I think is great. I’ve obviously got a bit of work to do before I catch up to Mum.”
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Michael Gleeson is an award-winning senior sports writer specialising in AFL and athletics.Connect via X or email.
