Usually, after a race, athletes talk about their performance and what went right or wrong. But for Amy Hunt, the conversation took a different turn after the British sprinter finished fourth in the women’s 200m final at the World Ultimate Championship, clocking a season-best 22.10 seconds behind winner Melissa Jefferson-Wooden. Just moments after the race, Hunt discussed the growing controversy surrounding Sydney Sweeney’s provocative sports advertisement.

“Sydney Sweeney, this is what women in sport look like,” a smiling Amy Hunt said in a BBC Sport interview clip shared by @JonnyRoot_ on X.

The 2025 UK National Championship 100m winner then pointed to Melissa Jefferson-Wooden’s winning performance, saying, “21.4. Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears. This is a beautiful evening.” For Hunt, Jefferson-Wooden’s 21.47-second victory was a perfect example of the physical strength, effort, and sacrifice that define women competing at the highest level.

The controversy Hunt referred to began after Sweeney appeared in a new advertisement for sports prediction company Novig. In the campaign, the actress appears naked while covering parts of her body with equipment from different sports, such as football, hockey, tennis, basketball, and soccer. The basic message of the commercial is that Novig is about “just sports”, rather than anything else.

Even near the end of the ad, she appears topless on a pool table and says, “You can’t trade this, I just look good here.” This provocative concept quickly spread across social media, with many viewers accusing the campaign of sexualizing women in sport.

Several female athletes soon joined the criticism. Olympic swimming champion Ariarne Titmus was among those who strongly objected, calling the advertisement a “kick in the face to every woman who has dedicated her life to perfecting her craft…”British Olympic cycling champion Sophie Capewell added, “Imagine a world where sexualised representation isn’t the most popular way of seeing women in sport.”

Hunt’s comments followed the same general argument. She stressed that the reality of being a female athlete is not always glamorous. “When you’re a woman in sport, it’s not pretty,” Hunt said. “It’s not glamorous. It’s not sexy all the time, definitely.” She also referred to the physical realities female athletes experience, including menstruation.

Hunt revealed that her period had started the day before the championship, using it as another example of something that is rarely part of the polished image associated with elite sport.

For Hunt, Jefferson-Wooden’s performance represented another side of women’s sport, one built on strength, preparation, pain, competition and years of hard work. After spending most of her life in athletics, the British sprinter knows better than most that there is much more to being a female athlete than how someone looks on the outside.

Hunt has lived through the less glamorous side of sport

Hunt has been in the sport since she was a teenager and quickly emerged as one of Britain’s brightest sprinting talents. At 17 in 2019, she set a world under-18 record of 22.42 seconds in the 200m and became a player to be reckoned with. However, her rise to the senior level was not as easy as some of her peers had hoped. While playing at an elite level, Hunt started studying English at Cambridge University in 2020.

Balancing academics with high-level training was difficult, especially during COVID-19. Those years affected her both mentally and physically. But then, in 2022, Hunt sustained a major injury to the quadriceps in a race. She later described how bad the injury was: “It was pulling the tendon off the bone.” She required surgery and faced a long rehabilitation before returning to competition.

Meanwhile, she was also competing hard in her Cambridge studies, which were a time of great difficulty for her. Hunt graduated in 2023, and then attended Padua, Italy, where she spent her entire career in athletics with coach Marco Airale. After that, her career started to take a different direction.

She won Olympic silver in the women’s 4x100m relay at the Paris Games in 2024 before producing one of the biggest performances of her career in 2025. Hunt claimed silver in the individual 200m at the World Championships in Tokyo, running a personal best of 22.08 seconds. After that breakthrough, she summed up the two sides of her life with the words, “You can be an academic badass and a track goddess.” And in 2026, Hunt continued to prove just how far she had come.

At the European Championships, she made history by becoming the first athlete to win four gold medals at a single edition of the competition, taking titles in the 100m, 200m, and two relays. That long road is what gives her latest comments another layer.