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“You have one life, so why would you not want to do it all?” Amy Hunt, the British sprinter, asks.
A walking, talking, reading, writing and sprinting embodiment of this mantra, Hunt was the athlete who announced herself to the public live on the BBC last year as an “academic badass and track goddess” after winning a silver medal in the 200 metres at the World Championships.
She laughs now at the adrenalin-fuelled remark – “I didn’t really know what I was saying” – but, during an hour that flows from medieval literature and weekends journaling in Venice to running a sub-11-second 100 metres and her sparkling new nails, she is no less entertaining or passionate.
Did she always have so much competitive energy?
“Oh yes, I love that element of putting on a show, being gladiatorial in the arena and receiving the cheers. I look like I could kill someone, but I’m also having the time of my life.
“I love to get in there and see how many people I can beat. At school, I used to race the boys every break time, lunchtime and I used to play every single sport with them. I was probably quite insufferable sometimes because I was so intent on winning and beating the boys. I wanted to be on every sports team.
“There is a funny video of a race when I was younger, doing an indoor 60m. It was me and seven other boys who entered and I won. You normally stand around after shaking hands. They just walked straight off. I felt quite embarrassed for them.”
Hunt’s eyes also light up as she thinks back to Tokyo last September when she saw off previous world champions Shericka Jackson and compatriot Dina Asher-Smith down the home straight to finish second. The look of open-mouthed shock quickly turned to joy.
She has followed that up this year by becoming only the fourth British woman to dip under 11 seconds in the 100m. She will be going for medals at the Commonwealth Games, which begin in Glasgow from today, and then the European Championships in Birmingham next month.
She has previously called the 200m “her husband”, but says that she has been having “an affair” this year with the shorter sprint and is emphatic in her belief that she could be crowned Olympic champion. “It would be the coolest thing ever to win the 100 at the Olympics,” she says. “It’s more than just a medal. The Olympics has a sort of ineffable magic, excitement, emotion, tingling craziness about it.”
The magnitude of the ambition only grows when you look at past winners of the event. There has never been a British women’s 100m or 200m Olympic champion – the events have been dominated for almost 50 years by sprinters from the United States and Jamaica. A Cambridge University graduate from Newark in Nottinghamshire would represent some shift to the traditional balance of power.
Defying the odds, however, is already a significant theme of Hunt’s story.
After A-levels in English literature, chemistry and music, Hunt had thought studying English literature at Corpus Christi College would be perfectly feasible to combine with a burgeoning athletics career that had recently featured breaking the world 200m junior record. She even thought they might welcome a student with alternative life experiences. “I went into it with such a happy-go-lucky mindset, thinking ‘This is going to be amazing’.”
An unexpected message of support from Alistair Brownlee, however, now feels rather more like a warning. “He was lovely; but just said, ‘Look, I’m here for anything’,” she recalls. “He’d already won two Olympic golds.” Brownlee had lasted one term while trying to combine medicine with his vast triathlon training demands. By the end of the first year, Hunt also wanted to drop out. She describes elite sport and Cambridge academia as two rigid, uncompromising and extremely time-consuming systems butting against one another. “We got told many times by the university side, and the track side, that we wouldn’t be able to do it,” she says.
Hunt ploughed on, paying her own way through Cambridge from the contracts she had secured for her running feats. She would combine her studying with late-night drives to and from Loughborough for training, but the challenge became a crisis in February 2022 when she ruptured her rectus femoris tendon, a thigh muscle that runs from the hip down to the knee. She moved back in with her parents, where there was an en-suite in their bedroom. Her mother had to cook for her and lift her in and out of the shower. She had to dodge their “rambunctious” one-year-old cocker spaniel Lando while getting around on crutches.
Long written exams, where you spend hours sitting in one position, were looming in April and May while she was studying from her bed. Just two extra weeks, Hunt says, would have been a godsend. “I remember going through so many conversations on the phone with them,” she says. And how did Cambridge respond? “I was met with absolutely, staunchly ‘no’. I remember getting so angry. Incensed and enraged at the inability to be flexible of this system that’s existed for so many hundreds of years. I remember saying to them on the phone: ‘Surely something similar has happened in the last thousand years... this is so crazy.’
“They said: ‘Look, if something happens, then people just usually defer.’ And I was: ‘Well, I can’t defer because then my final year will be 2024 and I don’t really want to be finishing this degree and going off to the Olympics at the same time. That’s really way too impossible.’
“I said to them: ‘I had this job before I came to university and I will have this job when I leave.’ They’re not used to that. While you’re there, your whole world is supposed to be Cambridge.”
It was, she stresses, not just this exam example, but the three-year juxtaposition of combining world-class athletics with a system so all-consuming that students are not even allowed to get part-time work as a barista.
Hunt’s personal experience is notable in the context of a wider decline in Oxbridge as a home of elite sportspeople. The rowing systems remain world class, but the days of rugby and cricket University matches being packed with international players are long gone. The most recent league tables for sporting success in the various annual British Universities and Colleges Sport competitions place Oxford and Cambridge respectively 14th and 21st. Hunt was the first Cambridge alumnus to win a World Championships medal in athletics since Jon Ridgeon in 1987.
“It’s an amazing system when it works but the university is split between the university, the colleges and the department; I think that the friction between those three entities is not helpful in a situation where you’re outside of the normal system,” she says. “The person that’s teaching you about Chaucer doesn’t really care what you’re doing outside of learning about Chaucer.
“So I presented a challenge that was somewhat unique. So while I had a really lovely experience with academics and supervisors, the pastoral side of things was very tricky.”
Hunt did, however, make it through those exams, despite feeling disadvantaged, and she did complete her degree the following year. “I’m stubborn,” she says. “I wanted to be one of the only people. I’m proud because it was touch and go at points.”
‘The world needs more optimism and more happiness’
Hunt says that recovering from the injury also became a wider turning point. “I used to get really, really nervous before races when I was a young athlete and I used to not be able to eat in the morning and feel absolutely horribly sick,” she says.
“My career flashed before my eyes and I wasn’t sure whether I was going to even be able to run again. I realised I have to kind of enjoy this moment... be incredibly happy and confident because what I get to do is such a privilege.
“I see my scar every day. It’s a really cool reminder every time I step on the track of what I’ve been through and this almost second life that I’ve created myself, which I just love.”
Hunt’s training base – overseen by Italian coach Marco Airale – is in Padua, itself home to one of the world’s oldest universities. She visits the Guggenheim Museum in Venice most Sundays and keeps a journal where she records her thoughts and observations. “It’s just the most dreamy, magical, beautiful place,” she says. “I live in a place that’s so full of romantic Renaissance history.” Hunt then tells me that I should try reading some Chaucer, recommending The Knight’s Tale or Parliament of Fowls as good places to start. “It’s helped to evolve what the English language is today,” she says. “Each generation has a different Chaucer; we’re much more influenced by him than we perhaps think. Many problems or issues that he wrote about are still prevalent to this day.
“I think when people think of medieval people, they just think of mud and huts and monks. But people still had very normal lives; they’re still making crude jokes that are funny to this day. As humans we like to tell the same stories over and over.”
The ever-present in athletics since 1896 has been the Olympic Games. Hunt will be 26 when the 2028 Los Angeles Games come around and, following Cambridge and a career-threatening injury, she is only just beginning to discover how good she can become. “If you’re not standing on the start line thinking that you’re going to win the race, then what are you doing?” she says. “I have to go out there every single time and think I’m going to absolutely annihilate the field and win by 10 metres.
“I think it’s almost like a neuroplasticity thing. Waking up every morning, thinking that I want to be Olympic champion, informs every single decision that you make throughout the day.
“For Tokyo, I spent weeks and weeks kind of visualising what it would be like for my name to appear on the scoreboard in a medal position. When it actually ended up being silver, it was more than my wildest dreams. That’s why I had such a crazy reaction.
“So I can sit here and speak very confidently about the Olympics, but if it were to ever end up happening, I think I’d be screaming and crying and running everywhere. But I like to live my life in a kind of radically optimistic way. I want to be Olympic champion, but I’m having fun. I think the world maybe needs more optimism and more happiness. And I think sport is such a tool to do that.”
Hunt hopes that she can also inspire people to combine academics with elite sport. She replies constantly to messages from young athletes and parents, trying to break down the mystique of a place like Cambridge and wants to set up a scholarship scheme. The university itself, however, has never contacted Hunt to try to learn from her experiences.
“It’s nice to be able to know that I’m empowering people,” she says. “If you’re in the comments on my vlog, I’m pretty much guaranteed to reply. I learnt so many skills from Cambridge that helped me, not just within my track career but my day-to-day life,” she says. “Education is such an important skill, especially for young sportspeople, because it teaches you discipline that you’ve not known before. I love Cambridge and I love going back.” She can also envisage returning to academia. “I want to immerse myself in the world, use my brain, see things, and be inspired by much more than my little bubble. It’s good to live as broad a life as possible.”
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