Driving a McLaren F1 simulator, attending red carpets and film premieres, and staying in a luxury hotel suite once visited by Amy Winehouse: British sprinter Amy Hunt’s life has changed immeasurably since she broke into the mainstream with an astonishing world silver medal in Tokyo last September.
But the 23-year-old is keen to keep her feet on the ground (or more appropriately, on the track) despite her rising profile.
Having rejected numerous opportunities, from attending the Peaky Blinders premiere to London Fashion Week, in order to focus on training, she tellsThe Independent and other outlets: “I don’t really say no with too much sadness. This is my job and this is what I truly love to do, and I am so in love with the life that I created. I’m so focused on upgrading that silver into a gold that it doesn’t really feel like a sacrifice.”
For some the name Amy Hunt may be familiar from seven years ago, when she exploded onto the scene for the first time. She set an under-18 world record over 200m and looked like the next star in the making, before a series of injuries, including a quadriceps rupture that left her needing help getting in and out of the shower, crippled her early senior career.
After several difficult years mentally and physically she has rebuilt her fitness and stamped her authority on the world stage, beating two-time defending champion Shericka Jackson in Tokyo and not content with stopping there.
The Cambridge graduate is a bubbly, good-natured, thoughtful personality, equally confident in front of a camera – she started a YouTube channel after the world championships and films all her own content, with her best friend Sally editing – and chatting to the media.
She returns to action in the 60m at the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Torun, Poland, this week, an event she freely admits she has a “love-hate relationship” with. She ranks it her worst of the three sprint distances but after completely reinventing her block start this year and running a 7.04s says they are now “happily married”.
Having successfully predicted she would win a medal in Tokyo she hopes her powers of prediction will come good again this week. She intends to equal or better her fifth-place finish from last year, although it is a competitive field, with Olympic 200m champion Julien Alfred, US national championships winner Jacious Sears, and compatriot Dina Asher-Smith also competing.
“It’s cool to be going into something actually ranked in the top five for once, so I don’t sound as crazy when I’m saying I’m gonna do well,” she says. “I really love being such a versatile sprinter. All of the sprinting greats, Usain [Bolt], Allyson [Felix], Dafne [Schippers], Tori Bowie, everyone who is truly the best at these events, do all of them. They’re not afraid to put themselves in positions where they’re maybe not the favourite to win, so I think for me doing the 60 is more just being entirely fearless and entirely confident in myself.”
A triple gold at the European Championships in Birmingham this summer is a major target, as is closing the gap to the likes of Alfred and world 100m and 200m champion Melissa Jefferson Wooden, two athletes she imagines racing against in the midst of tough training sessions.
She says: “I think it’s so good to have rivalries. It’s just maybe the polite thing not to say it out loud, but sport is emotional, and if I’m not emotional about not winning, then why am I there?
“It’s not even delusional, because you can’t think it’s delusional, you have to fully, wholeheartedly, with your whole body and soul and mind, believe that you are the best and you’re going to beat everyone. So everyone becomes your rival. But in terms of this year, I’m looking to get a lot closer and to start hopefully beating Melissa and Julien. I respect them a lot, therefore I want to beat them a lot.”
A step up to the 400m is also in her long-term plan, with her success in 2025 having pushed that back somewhat. She ran 368m in a 45-second time trial in South Africa, a time she was “incredibly happy” with, but laughs off the idea of a 400m race with 800m star Keely Hodgkinson anytime soon. “I think she might win right now, but maybe not next year.” And over 300m? The answer is definitive: “I’d absolutely have that, yeah,” she grins.
Having juggled athletics alongside earning an English degree from Cambridge she is passionate about ensuring academic young athletes do not give up their dreams of further education in order to pursue a sporting career. She often gets messages from aspiring Oxbridge students and acts as a kind of agony aunt.
It’s something she eventually wants to turn into a more official platform, along the lines of rapper Stormzy’s Merky scholarships. “That world of Oxbridge loves to be so shrouded in mystery,” she explains, “and that’s self-serving, because it keeps that sense of [being] like, cloistered away and it protects itself. But us talking about it opens up a lot more and enables a lot more women and girls from an athletic background to be able to get there. I know my decisions felt very limited when I was in the same position, so I’m trying to make more doors open for more people coming up behind me.”
Hunt rejected the option of doing English or sports science at Loughborough University, where many top athletes choose to go and where she was based before attending Cambridge, because it was “the easy way”. Juggling athletics alongside academics was difficult, but it also toughened her up. “You have to sort out a lot for yourself,” she says, “because the supervisors are very uncompromising and the system is very inflexible to your needs if you’re not a rower. You have to make those decisions yourself and grow up very quickly and be very, very organised.”
She is refreshingly candid – her agents may not appreciate her saying “I cannot overstate how much I love just standing on that start line, it’s my favourite thing in the world, so I would do it without even getting paid” – and determined to forge her own path. Athletes are constantly told to “stick to sport” but Hunt is keen to prove you can have it all, from her social media and YouTube presence to pursuing her interests off the track, and is unafraid to express herself.
Like all athletes she has dealt with some abhorrent messages online, particularly some “very disturbing” sexual comments when she broke through as a teenager. But her approach to abuse is quite different now, having grown quite a thick skin, and she believes it’s a necessary evil in order to get track and field into the spotlight.
“Now it’s just like, turn your phone off,” she says. “I think athletes should be open to a little bit more hate. That sounds horrible, but I mean it in a way that if we want our sport to grow, if we look at all the other sports, football, tennis, F1 that are huge in public and cultural consciousness, they get a lot more hate and aggression than we do. And I think it’s a natural counterpart to all of the amazing comments that you might get.
“So it’s better for us almost to actually be getting more hate because it shows that there’s more eyes on our sport, in a weird way. And in the least cocky way possible, my opinion is the only one that matters. I don’t really care what someone online has to say about my start.”
She is certainly not short of ambition, or of vocalising her goals. Having long been tipped for the top of the sport, she is now possibly even more determined to get there. “I look at people like Allyson Felix who are great across across the board and could do every single event and both relays, and in the most selfish, vain way, if you’re the person that’s at the LA Olympics and you’re winning medals in two individual events and two relays, and you’re going home with four Olympic medals, then that that makes you an icon for life and truly one of the greats, especially in terms of British athletics. So it’s definitely something we’re looking forward to, and I definitely have the strength to do it.” After something of a false start aged 17, it looks like the new and improved Hunt 2.0 is here to stay.
