Hobbs took the first steps on her athletics career at the Eltham Athletics Club. “I grew up along the road in Stratford. We all went to the Eltham club. There was a nice community and family atmosphere there.”
Her first real competitions were the Colgate Games, the huge athletics festival for children aged 7-14. In fact, Hobbs was an early starter. When she was only 6, she bumped up her age a year so she could compete!
She decided early on she wanted to be an athlete and showed tremendous discipline during her teenage years, while attending New Plymouth Girls” High School. “I made a lot of sacrifices in my teenage years, missing the classic teenage things like parties, socialising and so on. I doubted it was worth it sometimes. I was fearful I hadn’t made the right decision.”
But she stuck with it, and once she moved to Auckland and joined forces with coach James Mortimer, she began to make good progress.
But it wasn’t until December 2021 that she finally toppled Seymour from the top of the 100m sprint lists. Since then her rate of improvement seems to have picked up.
“I’m still getting used to saying ‘Athlete’ when someone asks me my job. But it means I don’t have to worry about study, or doing part-time work. I can think about things like prioritising recovery and tapping into provider support.
“It’s not just me out there running. I get a lot of support from people helping me to be my best self on and off the track.”
Hobbs says he loves her job. “I love competitions, and I love athletics. It brings value to my life, the travel, meeting people, connecting with people, getting to be with friends every day at training. It’s important I keep it fun, to be surrounded by a group of people who support me. There are lots of lovely moments. There are some down moments too, when you walk off into a field by yourself, but the up moments make it all worthwhile.
“Hopefully I’ll inspire others to take up this non-traditional sport [women’s sprinting in New Zealand].”
Reflecting on how she’s changed over the past couple of years, Hobbs says she has got more used to the publicity that surrounds top-class athletics. “I’m a person who loves chilling out, finding good coffee spots, hanging out with good people and linking with my family. I don’t love being in front of the cameras.
“At my first world champs there were cameras everywhere and it was distracting, those constant cameras. It preyed on my mind. Now I’m more comfortable with it all and don’t really notice them.”
Getting to Paris would be a dream come true, she says. “We haven’t had a [female] sprinter at the Olympics since the 1970s. I feel like I’m doing my bit to put sprinting on the map in New Zealand.”
It’s taken Zoe Hobbs years of sweat and determination to get to the point where she can call herself a fulltime athlete.
Hobbs, 26, is the fastest New Zealand women’s 100m sprinter of all-time. Her personal best, recorded at La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in July 2023 is 10.96. That sizzling time beat the 10.97s she ran in Sydney earlier in the year.
To put into perspective how fast Hobbs is running, the next fastest on the New Zealand all-time list is Michelle Seymour, who ran 11.32s in 1993. The champion sprinter before that was Wendy Brown, whose best was 11.50, set in 1974. And before that Doreen Porter ran 11.77s in 1964.
Seymour, Brown and Porter were members of the royal line of New Zealand sprinters, but Hobbs has taken it to another level entirely. Any woman who can break 11s for the 100m is flying.
At the world champs in Budapest in August, Hobbs eased through her heat in 11.14s, then recorded 11.02s in her semi-final. Cruelly, she missed a place in the final by 0.01s – two athletes ran 11.01s to edge her out.
She’s philosophical and encouraged by what happened in Budapest. Having mixed it with the best in the world, she’s excited about a big year ahead.
“I love competition and I can’t wait for the Paris Olympics. I loved the feeling at the world champs.”
“I was only 0.01s off qualifying for the final at the world champs and it’ll be the same runners in Paris. That was a big realisation for me – I belong at this level now and can be a contender, not just a participant, at the Olympics. There are things I can fix before Paris to get more speed.”
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At the 2022 world champs in Oregon she ran 11.08s in her heat and was eliminated in the semi-finals after running 11.13. She was the first New Zealand woman to reach the semi-finals of the world champs 100m.
Immediately afterwards, she headed to Birmingham for her first Commonwealth Games. Her preparation was hindered by her contracting Covid between Oregon and Birmingham, but nevertheless she ran 11.09s in her heat, 11.15s in her semi-final and 11.19s for fifth in the final.
More good work followed over the summer of 2022-23 and the pay-offs were evident on the track. At the national champs at Newtown Park, she was blown along by what Wellingtonians like to call a stiff breeze and clocked 10.89s.
“I’d been out for several weeks with a hamstring pull. I wanted to get back for the nationals; it’s a big event. My main concern was whether my hamstring would hold up.
“Running 10.89s, even though it was wind-assisted, was a huge shock and a massive boost because I felt if I was capable of doing that with a following wind, I could run under 11 seconds with no wind.”
That thinking was proved true almost immediately. The following week in Sydney she went under the magic 11-second barrier, running 10.97s.
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