Amy Hunt Makes European Championships History With Four Golds in Birmingham
Amy Hunt became the first athlete in European Championships history to win four gold medals at a single edition, sweeping the 100m, 200m, women's 4x100m relay, and mixed 4x100m relay at Birmingham 2026. The 23-year-old's final gold came on Sunday 16 August in the inaugural mixed relay, where Great Britain and Northern Ireland set a European record of 39.97 seconds. By the end of the night, Hunt was the most decorated athlete the championships had ever seen.
The week began on the opening night, 10 August, when Hunt won the 100m title in front of a home crowd at Alexander Stadium. Two million people watched on the BBC. Four days later, she completed the sprint double — winning both the 100m and 200m at the same championships — by taking 200m gold in 22.19 seconds, a 2026 European lead. Ireland's Rhasidat Adeleke set a national record of 22.28 seconds for silver, with Dina Asher-Smith, who reached a record 11 European Championships medals across the week, behind her.
Hunt's relay golds followed. The British women's 4x100m team won in a European-leading 42.05 seconds, 1.07 seconds ahead of Switzerland. Then came the mixed 4x100m relay, staged for the first time at these championships, and the European record that sealed the unprecedented quadruple. On that Sunday, 4.2 million viewers tuned in on the BBC.
Hunt celebrated the way a person who has just rewritten a record book might: a glass of champagne, a KFC, a 2am massage, and bed at 4am. She posted an Instagram video of herself twirling with all four gold medals to Abba's "The Winner Takes It All." Her social media following doubled in the space of a week. The following Monday, she appeared on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.
There is already a life beyond the track for Hunt, and it is not what you might expect. She studied Chaucer and the Material Renaissance at Cambridge. She lives in Padua, in northern Italy. And her next race was scheduled for Lausanne on Friday, a quick turnaround from the biggest week of her career to date.
What makes this stand out is the company Hunt now keeps and the team she belongs to. Dina Asher-Smith, her relay teammate, became the European Championships' all-time leading medallist in Birmingham. The British sprint squad is full of stories: Success Eduan works as a midwife; Imani-Lara Lansiquot wrote an acclaimed play, "Armour of Gaza," about growing up in Peckham. Hunt won a silver medal at the Tokyo 2025 World Championships, so this was not a sudden arrival. But four golds in one championships, on home soil, in a single week, before millions of television viewers, is a different kind of moment entirely.
