Only the third Kiwi woman to run 200m at a world champs, rising sprint star Georgia Hulls wants to pick up the baton from her grandma, Jean, who almost made it 60 years ago.
Before Georgia Hulls loads her feet into the starting blocks at her first world athletics championships, she’ll have written a list of names on the back of her race number.
It’s a ritual the 200m sprinter started this season to recognise those who’ve helped her get this far. Names like Morty (her coach James Mortimer), Zoe and Portia (fellow Kiwi athletes Zoe Hobbs and Portia Bing), and of course Mum and Dad.
“It’s quite a humbling thing to do, writing them all down,” 22-year-old Hulls says. “Everyone is quick to acknowledge their coach and physio, their parents, but it makes you realise there are so many people who’ve been a part of this journey.”
Near the centre of the race number is sure to be Nanny.
That’s Hulls’ paternal grandmother, Jean. The woman who no doubt passed on the genetics of a sprinter to her granddaughter.
Jean Adamson, as she was in her youth, was one of Britain’s best multi-discipline athletes of her time. She won silver medals in the pentathlon at the England women’s athletics championship in 1958 and 1959, and was a strong 300m runner (“Before they did the 400m,” Hulls says).
When the pentathlon was finally introduced as an Olympic event at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, her British rival, Mary Rand, won silver.
“It was always her dream to compete at the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games or the world championships, but she didn’t quite make it,” Hulls says. “They only chose one girl per event, and she fell a little short. But it’s pretty cool to be able to continue her story in some way.”
Georgia Hulls with her grandmother, Jean, in Sussex, after Hulls won bronze at the 2019 World Uni Games.
Now in her 80s and living in Sussex, Nanny Jean Hulls has won gold at the world masters championships and was still competing at veterans’ race meetings until 2012 - even some in New Zealand for her grand-daughter's Hastings Athletics Club.
After finding her old British racing singlet, Jean had hoped to give it to Hulls if she made the New Zealand team for the Birmingham Commonwealth Games later this month.
English-born Hulls missed out on the tough qualifying standard for Birmingham. But by winning the 200m at the Oceania championships in Mackay last month, she confirmed her place at her first world championships, which start this week.
Eugene, Oregon, is too far for Nanny Jean to travel to watch her granddaughter compete, but she’s passed on plenty of snippets of wisdom to her.
“When you’re a little kid you’re like ‘I’m going to be the best in the world', so it doesn’t matter what anyone else has done," Hulls says. "Now I’ve come to appreciate what she did, and it wasn’t easy for her back then, either. I’m so proud of her – and I know it goes both ways.
“Hopefully I’ll be able to take her singlet to Paris.” That’s the Paris 2024 Olympics she’s aiming for.
There’s no doubt Hulls could be a hot contender for the Olympics. A talent on the rise, now ranked inside the top 40 200m sprinters in the world.
She’ll be just the third New Zealand woman to run the 200m at a world championships – alongside Monique Dell in 2009 and Hobbs at the last world champs in 2019.
Her personal best time of 23.01s isn’t too far off Dell’s national record of 22.90s set at the 2009 world champs in Berlin.
And although the accountancy student has a fascination with numbers, she’s wary of setting herself time goals at these world champs.
Hulls will be lining up against legends of sprinting, like defending world champion Dina Asher-Smith – one of the fastest British women in history - and Jamaica’s finest in Olympic gold medallist Elaine Thompson-Herah and former 200m world champ Shelley-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
While she wants to run faster than ever to round out a season where she was only beaten over 200m once, Hulls also wants to soak up the experience of it all.
“I’ve always had number goals going into races, but this time it’s quite important for me not to have super strict time or placing goals. At the end of a massive season, I’d rather have some more controllable things,” she says.
“I want to build on this year towards Paris. So this event is quite important for me to just experience it as it’s happening.
“Still, if I don’t perform near my best, I’ll be disappointed. So if I can run here like I run at home, I’ll be happy.”
Hulls admits it’s become “a bit of thing” to break the 23s barrier. “It’s important to me – 22.99s seems so much faster,” she laughs.
That fascination with numbers, statistics and order has always been with her.
“Growing up, I’d tidy my parents’ bedroom for fun,” she says. “I don’t know I’ve relaxed nowdays, but it’s certainly not as intense. I’ve learned it’s fine to be flexible.”
She’s taken that passion for numbers into her other career – studying accounting part-time through distance learning with Massey University. Now living in Auckland, she’s also working for Mainfreight, managing their archives.
In another numbers game, Hulls believes improving her averages in the past year has been the biggest leap forward in her performance.
“It’s mainly been the consistency. My biggest jump has been with my average time – my top 5, top 10, top 20 times have dropped significantly,” she says.
“Yes, the top end has got faster, but my slower races are faster too. I think it’s very under-rated how important that is. Consistency is something you grow into as well.”
A lot of that can be put down to the work she’s done with Mortimer. She moved from Havelock North to Auckland in 2018 to work with him, having always being coached by her dad, Dean.
“It’s been a culmination of my last few years with Morty - it's been invaluable - and being patient as well,” she says. “Training with my dad was really great, too. They work quite similarly so it wasn’t a crazy jump.”
Dean Hulls wasn’t a track runner like his mum, but he was quick with a stick on the hockey field. He helped coach Central Mysticks in the national hockey league, and is director of sport at Hastings Boys’ High. (Dean was a banker in London when he and wife, Rachel, decided to move their family to the Hawkes Bay for a less hectic life; Georgia was three).
When he started to coach his daughter, he had no athletics experience. But that didn’t hold either of them back.
“We grew into it together,” Georgia says. “We learned together, bounced ideas off each other. There were a lot of things we must have done right.”
She appeared on the national athletics radar around 2013. While at Havelock North High School, Hulls won the 100m and 200m double at the national secondary schools championships, and the U18 sprint double at the 2015 national track and field champs.
Hulls was just 15 when she was first selected to run for New Zealand - at the world U18 championships in Cali, Colombia, reaching the semifinals of the 200m. She competed at the world U20 champs in Poland, the next year.
But one of the highlights of her career so far was winning bronze at the 2019 World University Games in the 4x100m relay – the team of students setting a New Zealand record in 44.24s. Also in the quartet was Olivia Eaton, Natasha Eady and Hobbs. “We’ve smashed that time now, but it was a really cool experience," Hulls says.
In April, Hulls and Hobbs lowered that record even further – winning the relay at the Australian track and field champs with Livvy Wilson and Rosie Elliott – in a blistering 44.05s. (Hulls won the 200m at the same event).
She hopes New Zealand can contest both the 4x100m and 4x400m relays on a wider stage soon.
“Relay goals are hard to set because it depends what competitions you can get into, but I’d love to see how far we can get in both relays at some major events,” she says. “I love running as part of a team – everyone rises up because you’re running directly for others. It’s a feeling that’s hard to replicate.”
After three weeks training in Montpellier in southern France – where her stamina was tested by delayed planes, trains, missing luggage and running in a thunderstorm – Hulls is settling into Eugene and the world champs environment.
She’s lucky, she says, to have Hobbs (who’s solely focused on the 100m) and 400m hurdler Portia Bing with her - "half of my training group from home."
Hulls also realises she’s fortunate to be part of a renaissance in women’s sprinting in New Zealand, with much of that to do with Hobbs - who’s broken the national 100m record four times this year (the latest while setting an Oceania record of 11.09s last month).
“We all feed off each other, and we don’t give Zoe enough credit for that,” Hull says. “Her success is what’s brought a lot of us up, from the 100m through to the 400m. We were talking about it today, how having someone run a really fast time normalises it, and suddenly you’re doing that time, too. Without her, it would have been a lot harder for most of us.”
Hulls’ parents will be in Eugene to watch her run her heat next Monday. She’s grateful they decided to settle in New Zealand and she got to have the classic Kiwi kid story: “They got me going to athletics because I had too much energy and I had to run it off,” she laughs.
“We got rewarded with pizza after club nights, because it was next door to the track. I started winning, and I fell in love with the sport later.
“So winning and pizza got me into running, and the sport kept hold of me.”
But does she still like pizza?
“It’s all right,” she says. “I’d much rather win.”
