Amy Hunt was third in Brussels.
Julien Alfred won the 200m in the Diamond League final in Brussels. Amy Hunt was third. What a season it has been for Amy. Those 4 gold medals at the European Championships, a Commonwealth silver medal, GB champion at 100m, and, going back, the silver medal at the World Championships in Tokyo last year. There was one striking difference between Julien and Amy. This was Julien’s 17th race of the season; Amy’s 42nd.
Amy is one of the most engaging athletes – bright, Cambridge graduate in English literature with an emphasis on the Renaissance, since you asked. When you talk to her, she gives you honest answers. Some athletes speak as if they are reading a statement prepared by their lawyer! Amy tells you how she’s feeling.
Talking to Sean Ingles of the Guardian and me, she was asked about how she kept going so late in the season. She told us: “That’s so much down to my training. We work so hard in winter, a lot of the reps. That is in order to support being going out and getting yourself on the line every single week. So when we’re kind of ‘in the trenches’, having 45 seconds of recovery, that’s so that I can turn it around week after week after week. And also I’m in such a privileged and unique position that my coach (Marco Airale) is also my physio, so he knows my body so well, and I know his mind so well. That enables us to get everything aligned, everything in flow, and we can turn the recovery around quickly and smartly.”
We wondered how she had coped with it the last few weeks – the seven races in five days at the European Champs, straight after the Commonwealths, with the emotional and physical drain. Her answer was typical!
“I’m just trying to have fun. I think there are times when you need to put the ego aside, and that’s throughout the whole season. I’ve been racing since early February, probably one of the only people out here. I’ve done a ridiculous amount of races, but it’s knowing which races you want to target and which races are purely on a training basis. So sometimes when we’re on the start line, the mindset is just ‘it’s nice to come out here and do a 200 rep instead of doing a 150 rep in my home track’.”
With a kind of shrug of the shoulders, she explains: “It’s part of my job to turn up and run fast so once we get to the important competitions it’s targeting the podium every single time. I’ve shown the last few 200s that I’m getting a lot stronger, and I think I was probably one of the closest athletes up to my PB tonight, so on a very, very freezing cold night in northern Europe in September at 10 p.m. I think that’s probably one of the best 200s I’ve ever done”. [Editor’s note: Amy was 0.08 from her PR, exactly the same as Kayla White. No one else was close to that].
Amy is enjoying her rivalry with Julien Alfred, for whom she has so much respect: “Tonight was the closest I’ve ever been to her on the bend and I thought ‘oh my gosh if I had completely fresh legs I could really take you on right now’, which is exciting and that’s such an exciting thing to me because she’s such an incredible athlete. I look up to her so much. She’s so fierce but also kind and to know that that was probably the best first half of the race I’ve ever put together makes it really exciting for the next time”.
Amy is only 24, so there is a lot more to come.
