Cathy Freeman understands the excitement - and the pressures - of the path for which Gout Gout seems destined.

The Kuku-Yalanji and Birri Gubba champion says the rising track star, who was born in Ipswich to Dinka parents from South Sudan, "is just something else"

"Watching him race, it's like he's running downhill," she told Seven's Spotlight.

"It's so like he's been shot out of a cannon.

"I think he's an absolute star, an absolute delight."

Recording similar times comparatively throughout their youth, Gout has been compared with Usain Bolt - regarded as the greatest-ever sprinter.

Gout said he was flattered by the juxtaposition, but rather than be labelled the 'next Usain Bolt', the teenager, who turns 18 on December 29, just wants to be himself.

"I completely get his point of view, but certainly he would be prepared for the comparisons now, wouldn't he?" Freeman said.

"I think he's his own story, I think he's his own future in his own present and he's going to be his unique tale."

Even well before the hype of Sydney 2000, Freeman remembers what it was like to deal with all expectations.

"I still have old photographs of what it was like at that age, and I do remember what it felt like for sure," she said.

"The excitement was always brewing there, but a little bit of fear as well."

The weight of expectation Freeman carried from 1990 may have swamped a lesser athlete but she never appeared to lose focus - even through two injured-riddled years ahead of the Sydney Olympics, including missing the entire 1998 athletics season.

From a 400 metres gold medal in Auckland at just 16 in 1990, through back-to-back dual gold at the Commonwealth Games in Canada four years later, Freeman set her sights on the home Olympics soon after the IOC gave Sydney the nod to host.

"I remember when, hello, '...and the winner is Sydney' and the moment for any Australian athlete looking towards the 2000 Games, I felt like 'Astro Boy' when jets were going from underneath the soles of my feet and I sort of became an animated superhero," she said.

Freeman first came close to a historic 400-metre gold at Atlanta 1996 against French champion Marie-Jose Perec, falling agonisingly four-hundredths of second short of the win in what was still a new Australian record.

The 27-year-old would light the Olympic flame in Sydney before, on the tenth day of the XXVII Olympiad, she won the 400-metre women's final in front of 112,524 spectators at Stadium Australia.

"I always wanted to be an Olympic champion and didn't care about the going-ons around me," Freeman said.

"In my heart and with all my soul, I was ready, willing and I was very able.

"I had a deadly sense of self-belief - I'd go to another level as I also had a sense of self-conviction."

They're choice words for Gout to ponder and value on his way to the top.

Part of the spark for Freeman came from the family home many years before she became a household name.

"It was my stepdad, who encouraged me to put a sign up on the wall, 'I am the world's greatest athlete' and the seed was planted six years previously," she said.

"It felt like a long time (to win in Sydney), but it was a short time at the same time as well."