Hunt’s four golds prove that choosing one identity was never necessary. Believing in all of them was enough.
“Are you not entertained?!” Maximus’ famous roar from the Colosseum floor in the blockbuster Gladiator was fittingly echoed by Amy Hunt as she crossed the line of the 200m sprint last Thursday night to become the British double sprint champion. In doing so she was firmly on her way to securing four gold medals in four events. Amy was on the hunt for victory.
The European Athletics Championships certainly were a week of entertainment, held in Birmingham from the 10 to 16 August. British athletes enjoyed huge success in front of a home crowd with Georgia Hunter Bell clinching gold in the 1500m, while 22-year old Emily Newnham secured silver in the 400m hurdles. The men were on top form also, with Romell Glave and Jeremiah Azu taking first and second in the 100m and Matthew Hudson-Smith winning the 400m.
But the star of the show, undoubtedly, was 24-year old Cambridge graduate Amy Hunt. Not only did Hunt win four gold medals at the Championships, she did so with fierce determination and loud confidence. Speaking to the BBC Woman’s Hour following the Championships, Hunt likened her performances on the track to being a “gladiator in the ring”; she indeed exudes the same boldness in the arena.
This persona stems from Hunt’s ambition to put on a performance for the crowd. She wants to look and feel fabulous, to be “iconic”, and firmly believes that “sprinting is such a confidence game”. It’s why her nails, adorned with Birmingham landmarks for the meet, mattered as much to her as the spikes in her shoes. They were another small piece of the performance, designed to make her feel unbeatable before the gun even went off.
But the self-assurance Hunt displayed in Birmingham didn’t come easily. In 2020, she began a degree in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Despite being promised support with her studies alongside pursuing professional athletics (Hunt broke the U18 world record in the 200m at 17 years old), in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic the university simply did not follow through and she soon experienced burn-out from trying to balance university with sport.
Then came a serious injury in her quadriceps in 2022, requiring surgery. Under Cambridge’s rules, she faced a difficult choice: return to studies or repeat the year, with limited flexibility to balance recovery and return to elite training while meeting academic deadlines. Yet Hunt persevered and graduated in 2023 before moving to Italy to pursue her athletics career full-time ahead of the Paris Olympics. She is open about the fact that she nearly gave up on Cambridge at the end of each of her three years there, but ultimately wanted to prove that she could be both an “academic badass and a track goddess”.
Indeed, Hunt has shown that academia and success on the track are not opposites. Both are a performance, both require self-assurance and confidence. A true intellectual, Hunt (who spends her rest days in Venice evaluating ancient art and literature) constructs a gladiator-like persona on the track. She feeds her comprehensive knowledge of narrative and characterisation into becoming a poised, bold and self-assured athlete. The insight that lets her comprehend and analyse the protagonist of a novel is what builds her character on the start line.
Most people are told, at some point in life, to pick a lane. Be the serious one or the fun one. Be the scholar or the performer. The reliable or the bold one. Amy Hunt’s career is built around a quiet argument against that choice ever being necessary. She is proof that confidence, like a good sentence, is something one can construct on purpose to achieve all one wishes to.
So when Hunt threw her arms out on that Birmingham track and asked the crowd if they were not entertained, she became proof that one really can ‘have it all.’ In a world where a multitude of opportunities can easily be overwhelming, Hunt established that all it takes is the confidence to be more than one thing, and the belief to be all of them at once. Amy Hunt became the first person in the history of the European Championships to win four golds at a single meet.
“2025 UK Athletics Championships 20250802 191902 – Amy Hunt” by Bearas is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
