Marie-Josée Ta Lou – and the Olympic dream

Marie-Josée Ta Lou – and the Olympic dream

Marie-Josée Ta Lou enjoyed one of her best-ever seasons in 2023.  From May to September, she ran twelve 100m races and won ten of them, including the Diamond Leagues in Florence, Oslo, London, and Lausanne.  She ran a 10.7 five times last summer.  The only races she did not win were the World Championships, when she finished fourth, and the Diamond League Final, when she was second.

When I asked her to explain how she was running so fast just short of her 35th birthday (18 November), she replied that, like good wine, she was improving with age! In the interview, she referred to herself as Ta Lou before bursting out laughing and saying, “I am not Ta Lou, I am now Mrs. Smith,” a reference to her marriage to J Smith in November 2023. Marriage has given her security and contentment and a strong base from which to compete.  Her Christian faith is another factor: “Without God, I could not achieve what I achieve now because there were many times when I wanted to give up. So, I think that God gave me the strength to not give up.  My career is almost different from any adult’s, I started really late. I started to perform late. I remember being told by different people that someone can’t start to perform at an elite level, like at 27”.

Ta Lou may certainly be described as a late developer not breaking 11 seconds until she was 27 and running a 10.7 for the first time when she was 32.  Growing up in Ivory Coast, the culture was not conducive to women playing sport: “Mostly women are supposed to be a wife and not to work. My mother didn’t want me to do sport.  She wanted me to continue with my studies and to become a doctor.  My older brother was a sports teacher. The second brother was in legal training. The third one, well, he got by. As I was the only girl in the family, she wanted me to continue my studies.  In Africa at that time, there was not much money in sports”.  She enjoyed playing football, but her family said she should not play football because she was becoming too much like a “failed boy”. It was only when her sports-teacher brother noticed that she was fast and could beat the boys in her class that she was encouraged to try athletics: “I ran in a meet.in Stade Abi in Abidjan. I had no shoes, no spikes, so I ran barefoot and won the 200m race, beating girls who had been…