When Amy Hunt crossed the finish line at the European Athletics Championships last weekend and held four fingers up to the camera signifying the four gold medals she’d won over the course of the week, the sprinter should have attracted nothing but praise.
Her gold medal haul was, after all, an unprecedented achievement.
Yet, inevitably, given Hunt doesn’t fit the mould that female athletes, or females in general, are “supposed” to fit, the backlash to her success was immediate and significant.
Hunt is, first and foremost, an excellent sprinter. The four gold medals she won at this year’s European Championships have been added to her trophy cabinet that also includes World and Commonwealth silverware, as well as an Olympic relay medal. This is, by anyone’s standards, an impressive collection.
What has made Hunt particularly stand out, though, is her keenness to acknowledge publicly just how good she is.
Unusually for a female athlete, Hunt is not shy about talking about her ambitions, nor is she slow to shout about her success once achieved.
Ahead of this summer’s European Championships, Hunt talked about “wanting it all”, by which she meant winning gold medals in all four events in which she was racing - the 100m, 200m, 4x100m women’s relay and 4x100m mixed relay. Come last Sunday night, she could consider it mission accomplished, becoming the first athlete in the event’s history to depart with four gold medals around their neck.
The reaction to Hunt’s success would be, you’d have thought, unanimously positive. But the 24-year-old Englishwoman has been deemed “unlikeable” by a significant proportion of observers. Her crime? Having confidence in herself and her abilities as a sprinter. It’s justifiable confidence. But this doesn’t matter because such clear self-assuredness is not a quality that female athletes “should” have, or certainly not display as openly as Hunt does.
The Englishwoman is undeniably a departure from the norm in terms of female athletes. Untypically, she does not play down her chances ahead of her races. And she does not deflect praise that comes her way in the aftermath of her success.
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Rather, Hunt consistently talks herself up both in terms of athletic achievement, and about her hinterland away from the track. Hunt is unusually articulate for an athlete - perhaps unsurprising given she’s a Cambridge graduate - and she can talk fluently and insightfully even in the immediate aftermath of her races. This places her in the minority of athletes who, too often, have fallen victims to media training.
Hunt is now the bookies’ favourite to be crowned BBC Sports Personality of the Year this December and it’s fascinating to compare her to her fellow runner who follows close behind in the odds market. As I write this column, Josh Kerr is second-favourite for SPOTY and while I’d argue his athletic achievements this year are considerably more impressive than Hunt’s - he broke the long-standing world mile record last month and followed it with Commonwealth Games gold - the Edinburgh man has much in common with his GB teammate. Kerr is similarly brash and confident, and also is quick to talk confidently about himself, yet I’ve seen almost no criticism of how he carries himself.
Kerr began talking months in advance that he would break the world mile record. There was no hint from the Scot that he’d “just do his best”. Rather Kerr has, for several years, talked openly about his belief that he has the ability to be the “very best in the world” and, given his world title, Olympic medals and, most recently, world mile record, few would argue with his assessment of himself.
But all the way through this talking-up of his abilities, Kerr has never faced a backlash. Observers called him confident, arrogant even, but this was never directed at him in a negative way.
And there are countless other male athletes who have conducted themselves through the years in a similar way. Usain Bolt, Noah Lyles, or, frankly, any one of the dozens of male sprinters who have come close to achieving success have shown equal, if not greater, levels of confidence than Hunt. Yet there’s barely a cheep about their brazen rhetoric. There’s certainly not a hate campaign on the scale Hunt has experienced over the past few days.
Interestingly, this has never been a problem that Scottish sportswomen have had to deal with. Scotland’s most successful female athletes in recent years - the likes of Katie Archibald, Laura Muir and Hannah Miley - are all unfailingly humble and modest. It’s nigh on impossible to imagine Muir staring into the camera and shouting about her success. And thus, these female athletes have received no criticism about their demeanour. Success without an attitude is, more often than not, how the public like their female athletes.
There has, though, to be a realisation, that it’s okay for female athletes, if they so choose, to be bold and brash and confident and even cocky. This is what sells and given track and field is a sport scrambling desperately for any attention it can get having disappeared from the spotlight it enjoyed a few decades ago, the attention that Hunt is drawing to it should be welcomed and encouraged. And don’t forget that nothing Hunt is saying is overblown - she’s merely acknowledging publicly her exceptional talent whereas there’s been more than a few male athletes who've talk openly about their ambitions despite being entirely delusional about what they are capable of.
Hunt is not the first female athlete to be on the receiving end of such hate. Tennis player Emma Raducanu knows just what a backlash feels like having been targeted for several years since winning the US Open in 2021. Freestyle skier, Eileen Gu, was pilloried during and after the 2026 Winter Olympics for being, basically, too intelligent and too thoughtful, despite being one of the best skiers her sport has ever seen.
Such misogyny within sport shouldn’t come as a surprise - a similar attitude towards women with confidence runs throughout society. But, at some point, we need to realise that firstly, these women are only acting in a way that dozens, or more realistically hundreds or even thousands of men have behaved before them. And secondly, this kind of talk attracts attention - and the more attention on female athletes, the better.
