Jil Sanchez

Happy birthday to Switzerland’s Jil Sanchez, who won a European title two days before her last birthday.

On 10 August 2025 at the European U20 Championships in Tampere, Jil won the 100m hurdles in 13.24 into a headwind, beating Melissa Benfatah of France by five hundredths. She went in as the number one seed and won her heat and semi-final on the way. She turned eighteen two days later. Swiss Athletics named her Youngster of the Year at their gala in Bern in November, and she became the fifth Swiss woman to take a European U20 hurdles medal, after Sabrina Altermatt, Noemi Zbären, Ditaji Kambundji and Valérie Guignard.

This year she has gone faster still. She ran 8.14 over 60m hurdles in February, and on 1 July she ran 12.96 over 100m hurdles, the fastest race of her life. She was selected in July for the World U20 Championships in Eugene, in a record Swiss delegation of forty-one athletes.

The thing worth knowing about her is what she was before she was a hurdler. Jil spent six years doing ballet, hip-hop and street dance, and she played the flute and the piano. Earlier this year she picked up a guitar for the first time, because she missed music and wanted to learn something new. Her explanation of why is lovely: when you listen to music you can dive into another world and just be with your thoughts, and it helps her organise her head. She describes herself as a really cheerful person who gets excited about things and is just happy and dancing.

She trains under Thomas Hager, whom she found at fifteen and asked to join full-time within a month despite a forty-minute drive each way, and she races for TSV Steinen, a village of about three thousand people in canton Schwyz.

Alles Gueti zum Geburi, Jil! Gsundheit, Glück und no viel schnelli Hürde. 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇨🇭