Sailing: Same goal, new tack for Hunt

By KEVIN NORQUAY

If your mother is Olympic 400m sprinter Penny Hunt and your father is a track-and-field coach, you are in Athens as a runner, right?

Wrong. Jamie Hunt, 25, will spend his Games competing in a 470 yacht with Andrew Brown.

It was "pretty random" that two Olympians from the same family should contest Games sports so dissimilar, Hunt agreed yesterday.

Somehow, the athletics ability that took his mother to national records over 100m, 200m and 400m and into the 1972 Olympic Games bypassed him, he said.

"Unfortunately, I wasn't blessed with the genes my parents had in terms of running. I was pretty bad at it.

"I had to come up with another sport, and I really loved sailing. My grandfather sailed, and I got that from him."

Hunt is part of the second mother-son combination in New Zealand Olympic history, behind swimmers Jean Stewart and Gary Hurring. Stewart swam at the 1952 and 1956 Games, and Hurring was at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

While it was nice to be part of history, "I didn't do it because of that", Hunt said.

But he was able to draw on his mother for the voice of Olympic experience.

"The biggest thing she conveyed is how much work, how much you have to put into it to make it to the top."

Hunt started sailing when he was 11, and was racing competitively at 16. He won a world junior 470 championship bronze medal in 1999.

He moved from Lower Hutt to Auckland to further his sailing career, but is still a complete amateur in an Olympic squad peppered with professionals.

He is rubbing shoulders with America's Cup yachties Dean Barker and Hamish Pepper.

But Hunt does not feel that having to work and train has hindered his ambitions to sail well at Athens.

"In some ways that gives us a little more fire. We're not here because it's our job. We're here because we really want to win."

- NZPA