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Amy Hunt’s mind is flashing back to the moment she unwittingly went viral last September. As untrammelled joy charged through her body, the BBC asked about her unusual journey from an English degree at Cambridge to a shock 200m world championship silver medal. Hunt’s response quickly became a cri du coeur to young girls everywhere: “You can be an academic badass and a track goddess.”
As the 23-year-old prepares for the World Indoor Championships in Poland that start on Friday, she reveals her remark was entirely spontaneous. “As soon as I said it, I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, I’m on the BBC, can I even say that? Are they going to bleep that out?’” she says, smiling. “I was so incredibly high with the adrenaline and endorphins that there wasn’t that connection between my brain and my mouth, necessarily, so I didn’t really know what I was saying.”
But Hunt’s message struck an immediate chord, because she now has sporty 16- and 17-year-olds asking for advice on how to get into Oxbridge. “There’s so many girls that message me every single day,” she says. “I’ll always say, just give me a call, because the interview is so unlike anything else you’ll ever do.”
Hunt has helped a couple of girls fulfil their dreams of getting into Cambridge and, in the longer term, she wants to set up a track and field equivalent to Stormzy’s Merky scholarships, which fund tuition and maintenance costs for black students at Cambridge. For now, though, her focus is solely on becoming “an icon” on the track over the next decade.
That means making sacrifices, although Hunt does not see it that way. After she won that silver medal, she suddenly found multiple doors and extraordinary opportunities opened up for her. But apart from a trip to McLaren’s F1 headquarters and seeing her NFL team, the Minnesota Vikings, play in London, she turned most of them down for interfering with her training.
“I really hate the term sacrifice,” she says. “People bring it up far too often. This is my job and what I truly love to do. I wake up every day and I am so in love with the life I have created.
“Turning these things down doesn’t really fill me with any sort of sadness. These opportunities – fashion weeks, Oscars, whatever – come around every single year whereas Olympics and Worlds, home European Championships don’t.”
Part of her reasoning comes from knowing how fickle sport can be. At 17, she smashed the world under-18 200m record and was hailed by Vogue as “one of the faces to define the decade”. But when she ruptured her quadriceps so badly while at university that her mum needed to lift her out of the shower, some thought she was finished. A 4x100m relay silver medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics and silver in Tokyo proved them wrong.
There have been other challenges, especially on social media . “I had somewhat of a breakthrough when I was 17,” she says. “So I’ve had two peaks in terms of public awareness. Interestingly, I used to get far more – I think pedophiliac is maybe a bit strong – but far more gross or maybe nasty messages when I was much younger.
“I still get a fair few, especially around championships, but it’s more just – I don’t know how I’d put this in a nice way – lustful comments. But I definitely got more of them at age 17, which is very disturbing.”
Hunt stresses that she has learned to deal with most of the abuse by blocking people or turning her phone off. But she is wise enough to understand human nature. “People are always going to hate,” she says. “One thing that is maybe controversial to say is that 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 because 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.
“Also, everyone’s entitled to their own opinions. So 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 starts.”
In a world where athletes are often encouraged to say little Hunt is a welcome antidote. She does not flinch when asked about her ambitions either. This year she wants to break Dina Asher-Smith’s 100m and 200m British records, win the treble at the European Championships in Birmingham and, in the longer term, she wants to be good enough to win medals over 400m.
“All of the sprinting greats are not afraid to put themselves in positions where they’re maybe not the favourite to win,” she says. “I would love to step up to the 400m. I look at people like Allyson Felix who were great across the board and could do every single event and the 4x100m and 4x400m relays.
“In the most selfish, vain way, if you’re the person winning medals in two individual events and two relays and you go home with four Olympic medals then that makes you an icon for life. Truly one of the greats, especially in terms of British athletics.”
How good could she be over 400m? “I definitely have the strength to do it,” she says. “We did a 45-second time trial in South Africa and the results were super good. I ran 368 metres, I think, so we were incredibly happy with that. That stacks up well against 400m specialists.”
For now, though, Hunt’s focus is on Torun. The 60m is too short a distance for her, given she is 5ft 10in and has a long stride that takes a while to wind up, but she finished fifth at the world indoors last year and has run 7.04sec this season, a time that gives her a medal shot.
Whatever happens, she is relishing the prospect of doing what she does best: putting it all out there, win or lose. “I truly love racing,” she says. “I cannot overstate how much I love to stand on that start line. I would do it without even getting paid. It’s my favourite thing in the world.”
