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Melissa Jefferson-Wooden reigned supreme in the women’s 200m in Tokyo but the British runner-up has endured a remarkable journey to make the podium.
Six years have passed since Amy Hunt revealed her sprinting superpower by setting a world under-18 record of 22.42 for 200m. Since then she has negotiated a pandemic, graduated from Cambridge University with an English degree, struggled with serious injury and moved to Italy to start a new life.
It has been a rollercoaster journey and on Friday in Tokyo the British sprinter hit top speed as she earned a silver medal in the World Championships 200m final behind Melissa Jefferson-Wooden of the United States.
Jefferson-Wooden was on another level, clocking a world leading time of 21.68 (-0.1) to complete a golden sprint double in Tokyo. Yet in the race for silver, Hunt clocked 22.14 to beat the 2022 and 2023 world champion Shericka Jackson of Jamaica.
Anavia Battle of the United States was fourth in 22.22 as Dina Asher-Smith, the 2019 world champion from Britain, was fifth in 22.43.
“I knew from my training I knew I was up with the world’s best but I just had to prove that,” said Hunt. “In the semi I managed to get a good lane in the final and my fitness and strength really showed through so it was amazing to demonstrate here the potential I’ve been showing all year.”
Hunt was a prodigious teenage runner and with her tall, rangey style and obvious intelligence and positive attitude, it could be argued she has always been destined for greatness.
When she ran her world under-18 record – on a sweltering day in Mannheim that was so hot it caused the plastic on the bottom of her spikes to melt – her time also broke Asher-Smith’s UK under-20 record that day.
Soon afterwards, the won the 2019 European under-20 gold in emphatic style. The following year Vogue named her as one of the “faces to define the decade”. But challenges soon reared their head and she found out why teenage talents often do not manage to bridge the gap from junior to senior success.
First the Covid pandemic interrupted her training and competitions, as it did to so many athletes. Then, at Cambridge University, she chose to commute back to Loughborough to train on her home track – as she grew up in the nearby Grantham – with her coach at the time, Joe McDonnell. It was a bold idea but she soon became exhausted – mentally and physically.
Studying at one of the world’s top universities meant she was often forced to spend more time improving her reading speed than her leg speed due to the sheer volume of books she had to get through for her course.
Injuries followed but Hunt graduated from Cambridge in 2023 and began to focus solely on athletics and started to slowly make her mark. A move to Padova to be trained by Marco Airale has clearly paid off, too, with Hunt nicely settling into Italian life.
“My transition from junior to senior athletics wasn’t the smoothest, so radical self-belief has been so important,” she says.
Last year she won European gold and Olympic bronze in the 4x100m. In 2025 she has gone from strength to strength, too, winning the British 100m title in a PB of 11.02 and being narrowly beaten by Asher-Smith in the 200m on the same weekend in Birmingham.
Then at the London Diamond League in July she was crying after finally breaking her six-year-old PB with 22.31.
In Tokyo she ran a PB of 22.08 in her semi-final to pass the legendary Kathy Cook and move into No.2 behind Asher-Smith on the all-time UK rankings. Many fans say she’s reminiscent of the tall long-striding Cook, who moved up from 100m and 200m to win 400m bronze at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.
The Olympics return to LA in three years’ time and Hunt should be in her prime. Only problem is that she has to get past the impressive Jefferson-Wooden first.
On her rise to the podium, Hunt said: “Going through a rupture, surgical repair, going through the Cambridge system, getting my degree, moving countries to somewhere where I really still don’t speak the language. It’s been a massive roller coaster and I’ve just trusted myself the whole entire time, I’ve just known I had it within me, and that failure was never an option for me. I knew I would make it.”
READ MORE: Amy Hunt’s training
She added: “Even before this race, I visualised it so many times and to actually finally do it is so incredibly surreal. That’s why I screamed.”
Did she ever consider quitting? “I knew I had something was within me. I think running so fast, so young, I’m running faster than any of these girls have run aged 17.
“I knew I was too talented for it to go to waste. I had a fire. I had a light inside of me that just said, it’s worth it. Keep going.”
The final word should go to Jefferson-Wooden, though: “It was very special. Coming into the World Champs I knew there was a high chance to complete the double. I managed to do exactly what I set out to do as well, so I’m really happy.”