Zoe Hobbs

Zoe Hobbs (born 11 September 1997) is a New Zealand track and field sprinter competing in the 60 metres, 100 m and 200 m. She is the Oceanian indoor record holder for the 60 m and the Oceanian record holder for the 100 m.

Hobbs was the first Oceanian woman to break the 11-second barrier in the 100 m. She has won 12 individual New Zealand national titles.

Zoe Hobbs was born in Stratford, Taranaki, to Dorothy and Grant Hobbs. She is Māori, of the Ngāruahine iwi (tribe). She attended Ngaere School, where she enjoyed racing boys barefoot at lunchtime, New Plymouth Girls' High School in New Plymouth, and Massey University in Auckland, graduating in 2021 with a Bachelor of Science degree, majoring in Human Nutrition.

She started athletics at Eltham Athletics Club at the age of five, though also played other sports growing up. In her final year of high school she started focussing primarily on athletics.

As a 15-year-old, Hobbs made the semi-finals of the 100 metres at the 2013 World Youth [Under-18] Championships held in Donetsk, Ukraine. She won the national secondary schools 100 m title three years in a row.

She set the current New Zealand U20 100 m record of 11.53 s on 20 July 2016 in the heats of the World U20 Championships in Bydgoszcz, Poland, progressing to the semi-finals.

Hobbs competed in Summer Universiades in Taipei in 2017 and Napoli in 2019, making the finals of both the 100 m and the 200 m at the latter, as well as winning a bronze medal (and setting a NZ record) as part of the NZ women's 4 × 100 m relay. In January 2019, she broke Michelle Seymour's 1994 New Zealand residents 100 m record with a time of 11.42 s. Later that year, she competed in the 100 m and 200 m at the World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar.

In 2021, Hobbs twice equalled Michelle Seymour's 28-year-old NZ 100 m record of 11.32 s, before lowering it on 18 December to 11.27 s.