Wearing a tiara, draped in the British flag, and clutching an unopened bottle of chocolate milk. This is Amy Hunt.
She stood as the double European sprint champion in Birmingham, England, having added 200m gold on Thursday to her 100m title from earlier this week. Hunt is the first to win both events at one championships since fellow British athlete Dina Asher-Smith in 2018, and only the fourth this century to sweep both golds.
“I’ll always remember this week,” she told reporters at Alexander Stadium, an arena just a couple of hours away from her hometown of Newark in Nottinghamshire. “It didn’t matter what anyone else was going to run. I was always going to win.”
The race had the symbolism of a British changing of guard. Asher-Smith, 30, and a six-time European champion, produced her trademark fast start from lane six. She was ahead at halfway. Hunt, one lane outside her, boasts superior top-end mechanics, and the 24-year-old reeled her in by 140m.
Her winning time of 22.19 seconds (+0.7m/s wind) is the fastest by a European this year, and proved enough to hold off the fast-finishing Rhasidat Adeleke. The Irish woman produced the run of her life, going from fourth at 90m to second at the finish, and bettered her own national record to 22.28s, snatching silver from Asher-Smith by one hundredth.
Her career arc is unique. In 2019, a month before she turned 17, Hunt ran 22.42s for 200m, which still stands as the fastest outdoor performance by a junior. The next year, she enrolled on a bachelor’s degree in English at Cambridge University, studying at Corpus Christi College, and graduated in 2023.
Taking the student-athlete route into professional sprinting is common, though normally athletes head to the U.S. collegiate system. For Hunt, a sense of completeness runs deep. “I always said I’d do a master’s at some point,” she said in the press conference ahead of the London Diamond League this July.
“At some point I will look to go back (to academia), have it alongside track. I’m a human being and I want to experience the world as (that), not just as Amy Hunt the professional athlete.” She cited Olympic 200m champion Gabby Thomas, a Harvard graduate, as someone she admires for being able to do both.
Hunt trains in Padua, northern Italy, under renowned sprint coach Marco Airale. It’s somewhere she can “retreat into her bubble,” as she explained it to The Athletic, with Venice just 15 minutes away by train.
“I do a horrible lactic session, back-to-back 250m (reps), on the Saturday, then I’m wandering around the Guggenheim (museum) on the Sunday. It’s a gorgeous, balanced life. I get to live in the magic of Venice and go on a gondola whenever I want. Who else can say that?”
Hunt has repeated the phrase “complete sprinter” throughout 2026.
“I pride myself on being globally competitive in the 60m, 100m and 200m. I’m top 10 across all three, and that’s rare. It’s fun being able to be everything and do everything,” she said in July.
For someone with such a multifaceted identity, this season has involved some reinvention. Hunt races lots: 43 times in each of the past two years, and the 200m final in Birmingham was her 35th outing of what is fast becoming a golden campaign.
She lowered her 60m PB by five hundredths to 7.04s in late February, and an elusive first sub-11 clocking for 100m finally came at the end of June in Stockholm.
“It was a longer journey than people realise,” she told The Athletic of her 10.99s run one month later. “I think I was capable of it at multiple points last year, but I couldn’t bring it together.”
Amy Hunt crosses the finish line before Dina Asher-Smith of Team in the women’s 200m final at the European Championships in Birmingham.(Maja Hitij / Getty Images for European Athletics)
She added that she went into the PB race “off a really rough period of training.” Achilles tendinopathy has caused her problems, meaning early summer consisted of cross-training with very limited time spent in sprinting blocks.
“My coach finds it funny that I was on the bike the week before (the 100m PB). It just goes to show that everything doesn’t have to be going perfectly to pull out a good result. That’s really good to have in your wheelhouse at championships.”
That last sentence proved prophetic. It seemed curious that, for a sprinter who closed races so well, Hunt had not built on her 60m and 100m bests in her 200m races. She relinquished her half-lap national title in June, and her season’s best going into these championships was 22.30s for fifth place at the London Diamond League, well behind the top two of Julian Alfred (21.66s) and Thomas (21.81s).
Hunt explained why after the race. She’s been dealing with low blood pressure: “In London, I had to be taken to the medical room. I was on the floor, on the verge of fainting. We had to do a lot of scary heart tests. (There’s been) a lot going on, so I felt like we haven’t been able to touch anywhere near my 200m potential.”
Coach Airale has adjusted training, prioritising speedwork over endurance to ensure that Hunt did not pass out. “That’s why the 100m races have been going a lot better,” she said.
But this is a former Cambridge student, one who insists that her flight bag is “the most A-star you’ve ever seen,” packed with blue and red-light glasses, a sleep mask and melatonin. She knew she could outwork low blood pressure.
Electrolytes, cold towels, nutritional analysis and daily blood pressure tests helped her through. “It’s definitely not been the most straightforward journey but I think that’s what makes it the most rewarding,” she said.
The defining moment for her was the semifinal. “I was almost scared coming back into the 200m and the way I felt,” she explained. Her 22.37s run meant she won by nearly three tenths and went into the final as the fastest qualifier. “That dispelled all my worries.”
It is not her first and will not be her last bump in the road. She had to watch from the stands four years ago when the Alexander Stadium hosted the Commonwealth Games. She ruptured her rectus femoris, one of the thigh muscles, and was on crutches. “Now I get to be the main star, so it’s an amazing full-circle moment,” she smiled.
Nobody summed it up better than the Brit herself, moments after crossing the line. “Are you not entertained?” she shouted down the camera, an homage to the film Gladiator.
A braggart and brilliant. This is Amy Hunt.
