The video – watched millions of times across social media – is irresistible, showing Gout Gout recording the fastest 200m time by a teenager, ever, on Sunday at the national athletics championships in Sydney. Witness the moment in person, and it was one of Australian sport’s unforgettable days.

Yet look at the background behind the teenager, and you see an almost empty grass hill. As Gout turns and celebrates, saluting the crowd, he does so to a half-empty grandstand.

This was the highlight of the annual athletics calendar, a pleasant autumn afternoon in the middle of school holidays in Sydney, at a venue next door to the Royal Easter Show well serviced – on this day at least – by public transport. Lachlan Kennedy had ensured wide awareness of the carnival, after he broke 10 seconds for the 100m on Friday and Saturday.

This extraordinary athletic feat by Gout – and Aidan Murphy – however, was seen by a crowd of barely 3,000.

“In terms of ticket sales, they weren’t as strong as we would have liked,” says Athletics Australia chief executive, Simon Hollingsworth, the two-time Olympic hurdler and former chief executive of the Australian Sports Commission handed the task of guiding the sport towards Brisbane 2032. “But in the context of the overall picture of the broadcast numbers, together with the attendance, we’re still seeing overall growth.”

Athletics is a pillar of the Olympics, and the source of household names like Cathy Freeman, Peter Norman, Robert de Castella and Louise Sauvage, yet it sits far from Australia’s sporting mainstream.

Across its summer season, meets are held in major capitals culminating in the Maurie Plant Meet – named after a deceased promoter once embroiled in a doping controversy – and the national championships. Event attendance is largely made up of participants, their friends and family, and a limited audience of athletics devotees.

The corporate entity Australian Athletics – formerly Athletics Australia, but renamed under a rebrand last year pitched as a “bold new identity” – brought in $22m in revenue in 2024-25, making the organisation roughly one-fiftieth the size of the AFL.

Hollingsworth has a vision for growth. “Three years ago we didn’t have any athletics on free-to-air television, it was all streams, so you might get snippets on news coverage at night but you didn’t have prime time TV,” he says. “Athletics will rate and people will watch it, we’ve got a good product to sell.”

Last year Seven screened the senior debut of Gout at the Maurie Plant Meet on its main channel, and this year they added three days of the national championships. “Nearly nine, 10 hours of prime time TV coverage is just fantastic,” Hollingsworth says. “And hopefully that builds as we look forwards to discussing what the broadcast future looks like.”

The sport’s current arrangement with Seven has now expired, and negotiations on a new deal – likely stretching to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics – have begun. Nine’s decision to show last year’s world championships in Japan alongside SBS indicates the process will be competitive.

Yet so too is the Australian sporting marketplace. Athletics was relegated to Seven’s secondary channel on Friday due to the AFL. The lack of football on Seven on Saturday gave enough oxygen for athletics’ best result of the weekend – almost 1.5m reached for the highest non-news program of the day, with an average audience of 409,000 – before Gout’s race drew approximately half those numbers in competition with footy on Sunday afternoon.

To Hollingsworth, it’s a sign that interest in athletics is bigger than Gout. “We’ve taken the opportunity to showcase athletics right in the middle of Gather Round and get some great results.”

A spot on free-to-air immediately increases the reach of the sport. Hollingsworth says it was a “risk”, requiring the sport to partly meet costs of an elevated production involving more cameras, a drone, and an array of athlete vignettes, as well as tweaking the program to make it more TV-friendly.

But, he believes, a risk that was worth it. “We’re trying to establish it as the pinnacle of our sport, the national championships, but also trying to make it a product that people want to watch.”

Much of the wider interest in the sport right now is tuned to the 20-or-so seconds it takes for Gout to run 200m. Hollingsworth says the “hype” around him is “unprecedented”, and exceeds anything he has seen in his four decades in the sport.

“Obviously, Cathy [Freeman] is probably the most famous over the last 30, 40 years in terms of interest. The difference between Cathy and Gout is that the hype for Cathy only started from 1994 onwards when she was a little bit older.”

Having lived the ups and down of the sport over his career, Hollingsworth knows the sport cannot put all its eggs in the basket of an 18-year-old. “One of the things we’re going to really focus on is, with this depth we have, these great competitions between individuals.”

He cites the budding rivalry between Jess Hull and Claudia Hollingsworth, who were involved in a controversial incident in their 1500m final on Friday. There is also the consistent excellence of Nicola Olyslagers and Eleanor Patterson, who both won high jump medals in Paris, and Cam Myers’ pursuit of Olli Hoare’s national 1500m record, even as the latter remains at his peak.

Then there is the emergence of Kennedy, whose rivalry not only with Gout but last year’s national champion Rohan Browning, has electrified the men’s 100m. Kennedy became the first Australian to break 10 seconds over 100m on home soil on Friday.

“Not every race will go under 10 [seconds], not every Gout run is going to be the top so-and-so in the history of the sport,” Hollingsworth says. “So you’ve got to give people a reason to come along and watch, and they want to see great racing.”