Swiss hurdler Jil Sanchez turns from dance and music to athletics

By Owen Murray

Two days before her 18th birthday, Jil Sanchez woke up excited in Finland.

She knew that, later that day, she’d stand on the European stage at least once. If her 100m hurdles semifinal went well, she’d stand there twice. Sanchez, now a Swiss international hurdler, is used to existing in front of an audience; before this life, she was a ballet and a hip-hop dancer, then a flautist and a pianist.

But she had to set arts aside when athletics clicked, and on the edge of 18, she toed the line in Tampere as the favorite in a European U20 final. She remembers the atmosphere.

“It’s big,” Sanchez said. “It’s overwhelming. But I think it’s cool because, especially in international competitions, you have your whole team — your whole country — behind your back.”

When Sanchez is standing down there, tensed, she can dissect the roar. She knows her teammates are one pitch. She knows that part of it is her nation. She doesn’t remember her races, but she has a word to describe the feeling in the blocks.

“It’s electrifying,” she said.

Her final was run into a 1.5 m/s headwind, but Sanchez forged ahead. When she crossed the line in 13.24 seconds, the new European U20 champion covered her mouth in disbelief. The stage was hers.

Ahead of August’s World Athletics U20 Championships at Hayward Field, Sanchez is growing toward her next peak. She’s combining music and movement as one of Europe’s best young hurdlers, and as she returns from the injury that ended her 2025 outdoor season to chase a first world title, she’s embracing the big stage.

Six months ago, Sanchez picked up a guitar for the first time. She grew up with music and dance — the ballet, the hip-hop, the street dancing classes were six years of her life. Now, she’s teaching herself guitar.

“I missed music,” she said. “I wanted to learn something new.”

“Electrifying” isn’t how she’d describe the feeling she has when she’s holding her guitar. It’s meant to be a window into a relaxing, calm experience that she doesn’t always get on the track. 

“I think when you listen to music, you can just dive into another world, and you can just be with your thoughts,” Sanchez said. It helps me organize my thoughts and my head.” 

Thomas Hager remembers the first time he met Sanchez well. She was 15 years old, and he’d been assigned as a regional coach.

“It wasn’t that good of a day for her,” Hager said. “My question, in the end, was, ‘Should we talk now or should we talk later?’”

She picked later. They never talked about the race, but a month afterward, Sanchez asked if she could join Hager’s training group. It was a 40-minute drive from her home, but she started splitting time between training with Hager and time at her local club.

Once Sanchez did, she started asking the questions. One of the first, Hager said, was what her “perfect week” of training would look like under him. She had a “feeling,” he said, that something was wrong with her regimen. They were sitting before training in a gym, and Hager grabbed paper and a pen to draw it out.

“Why don’t we change everything to this?” Sanchez asked. Hager obliged.

“I didn’t expect that question at that age,” he said.

Sanchez advanced quickly; she was all-in, with music and dancing set aside to pursue athletics, she arrived at a U18 final with a 14.2-second personal best. The spark, though, was still to come. That final saw her cut 0.6 seconds off her time.

“It was kind of the day where everything clicked,” she said.

In Sanchez’s eyes, hurdling is a combination of speed and technique. The speed was always the part she loved, and if there’s overspeed sprinting on the training plan, she’s “smiling all week,” Hager said.

But the technique is what keeps her coming back, and the combination of both, she said, makes it “really special.”

Hager, Sanchez said, has always been a strong communicator, and they operate on the same wavelength. On that day, she started going faster and faster over the hurdles each round and found a new feeling — “fast hurdling,” she said. It was one German word in a conversation between the two that had unlocked the sport to her.

“Kompakt.”

The line between electrifying and calm, for Sanchez, is one she takes time to understand. Her home, Steinen, is home to just 3,000. Her time away — at first, driving to Hager's training group, then traveling to meets — takes her further from the place where, she said, “everybody knows everybody.”

From her desk at home, she can see the hills. She walks through the town when she returns. The feeling on those walks is similar, she said, to the one she gets with her guitar — a sense of calm. She’ll always love to travel; her Instagram highlights are labeled “europe”, “london” and “españa”; but her hometown is always a unique feeling.

She left home for Finland in August 2025, with that European final on the line. As she dissected the crowd at the final, there was one face she knew wasn’t there.

Hager also works as a teacher. He stayed as long as he could, for Sanchez’s heats and semifinal — so long that he had to do some running of his own to the bus and the airplane back to Zurich.

He sat on the flight with two other coaches. Hager didn’t know the flight had internet access, and so when a coach approached him with the live results, he had to make a decision: wait, or watch. 

The coach handed over his phone. Hager was cheering in his seat.

“I could watch all the runs afterwards, and it was overwhelming to see the emotions,” Hager said. “To see her succeed in such a race and enjoying all that — it's fun to watch.”

Weeks after that final and the Swiss national championships, Sanchez’ season was derailed by a tendon injury in training. She still had the Swiss U20 championships ahead.

“I think I’ve learned to accept what happens,” Sanchez said. “In the beginning, when I had to deal with injuries, it was destroying me because I couldn’t do what I loved anymore. I didn’t like that feeling at all.”

Now, she looks to grow during that time. She trains her mind. She’s finishing high school — when she returned home in April 2026, it was for a week of finals. It’s about taking the best out of the time, she said. It’s about progress off the track.

She loves the electrifying stage. The World Athletics U20 Championships Oregon 26 are next on her list, where the 100m hurdles final will come four days before her 19th birthday. That’s where she wants to perform.

Guitar, though, will take more time. Hager has never heard her play, he says, but he’s seen her run — and he knows how far that’s taken her already. Wherever she lands, it’ll be with a smile.

“I'm just a really cheerful person and when I like to do something, I really get excited about it,” Sanchez said. “I'm just so happy and cheerful and dancing.”