Amy Hunt, British-style student athlete
American readers will be familiar with the concept of being a student athlete: athletic scholarships, an elite college coach, world-class educational institutions, and more. Amy Hunt’s experience was anything but.
In 2019, at the age of 17, he won the 200m gold at the European Under-20 Championships. After leaving high school, he enrolled as a student at Cambridge University, which was founded in 1209. Cambridge is an ancient city with a population of 150,000. No wonder when they built the campus, they left no space for parking. In any case, the UK is largely a public transport country and students generally don’t own cars. In this article, I talk about the challenges that Amy faced in combining running and studying at an elite level.
Amy summed it up in one sentence. “Cambridge Uni doesn’t really have a concept of a student athlete.” He continued. “You primarily, in fact exclusively, student And that’s something they make very clear when you log in. We tried to have lots of conversations beforehand about my running ambitions. It was an incredibly stressful time, not helped at all by the fact that I tore a hamstring in the middle of my sophomore year when I was just starting to figure out how to manage it all.
“I was 18 years old and started running. In January I would run 7.2. So I was thinking, well, we can go to 7.1. So here we go into February, and that’s when I did my hamstring, which then really, really soured my relationship with the university and my professors because I wasn’t offered any support. I had one more term to finish but I couldn’t take the year again because then my last year would have been an Olympic year (2024) and I knew that was a no go. That would be impossible. Won’t you see me now? I’d be dead and buried.”
Amy found the system completely uncompromising. it was either business as usual or a full recovery for the year. Amy said: “How come there’s been nothing in the thousand-year history of this institution where someone has had something like this and had to just push back exams, but their system is so rigid and also incredibly complex, with the relationships between colleges and departments and the university, and it makes anybody. dealing with variants or inconsistencies is too complicated. So, because I was such a unique puzzle. Such a rare specimen in that system that it became many stressful conversations. Also, I think academics have a very different understanding of sports than you or I do. I found myself spending a lot of time trying to explain things to people. When I say I do, I don’t just get down on the treadmill and just mess around. It’s a very serious undertaking, and it’s a lot of hard work, and one I told them I didn’t want to do spin the overused phrase, but telling them that being an elite athlete is a 24/7, 365 day thing.”
And it was trying to explain to them that I had this job as an athlete before I joined the union; I was actually a sponsored athlete before joining this union. And I will have this job when I go. So you guys are not the main thing in my life. But they want to be the be all and end all in your life. It became very poisonous. So it was incredibly stressful. The people there have been so lovely and have so many incredibly close friends from university and some wonderful, wonderful people, but the system itself is very complicated. Having said that, I really want to help other athletes get through the Oxbridge experience.”
It all ended happily with Amy getting a degree from Cambridge University, which she describes as “the most valuable degree on the planet, which will set me up for life outside of sport or whatever I want to do. And it’s just something that I knew I was capable of, and it was an incredible challenge. And I’m really incredibly proud of that.”
The whole experience left Amy with a real desire to help others who are in the same boat. He felt privileged to be running with academic brilliance and world-class talent, but frustrated that he felt pressured to choose one or the other. He says: “It would be so good to see a lot more athletes go through the Cambridge experience because you don’t have to choose. I think it’s really tricky as a British athlete because you really have to do it. Sacrifice something you’re good at and something you love to pursue another, especially because they can help each other, and it makes you a much better person, and it gives you such intangible and amazing skills that can manage life, but when you’re out there trying to deal with it, I just wish someone had warned me how stressful it was going to be.”
The lack of elite training facilities and lack of car parking in Cambridge was a real logistical challenge; in the sense that he couldn’t drive because they couldn’t park near his college when he came back from training late at night. And it’s a 95-mile intersection. He explains how he did it work and lectures all day. My father drove all the way down to pick me up from Cambridge. We go back to train in Loughborough and then when I’d finish a session he’d drive me all the way to Cambridge, arriving at midnight, then he’d have to drive the 85 miles back home. He did about 7 hours every week, just because the people and systems around me at the time essentially put the whole load on me. At the time, I didn’t feel supported by anyone outside of my friends and family. You know that All this travel, all this sorting and organizing and logistics was on me.”
It’s hard to imagine how Mr and Mrs Hunt must have felt when their Cambridge graduate daughter jumped ship in Tokyo this summer, knowing the sacrifices she and they had made.
