From indoor pentathlon in winter to heptathlon in summer, Ilionis progressed steadily throughout her early teenage years. Her standout performances—particularly in the long jump and 60m hurdles—earned her a place at Montpellier’s CREPS training centre. She made her national debut at the French U18 championships in Nantes, where she entered four events and finished at the top in all of them: high jump, long jump, triple jump and 60m hurdles. “I even broke the French records in the triple jump and hurdles,” she recalls. A few weeks later, at the World Youth Championships in Cali, Colombia, she delivered again, this time missing the podium in the triple jump and the 100m hurdles “by just 2cm and 2 tenths of a second”.

Ilionis’s versatility and results got her noticed, and she headed east to the PACA region’s elite training facility on France’s southeast coast. There, her coaches were former triple jump world champion and world record holder Teddy Tamgho, and former sprinter Laurence Bily. “That’s when I really learned what it meant to compete at the top level,” she admits.

But with high-level coaching came big decisions. “I had to choose,” she explains. “It was either focus on the triple jump, where I was a strong contender, or stick with my true love, the 100m hurdles, where I had less chance of reaching the podium.” A third-place finish at the 2018 U20 European junior championships in Grosseto followed by a more than 14-metre jump in Liévin that earned her an indoor French national title made the path clearer: “Teddy told me it was time to focus on the triple,” she says.

After receiving her high school diploma in management science, Ilionis followed her then-coach to a centre in Reims, France. While training, she continued her studies and completed a two-year degree in customer relations. But doubts began to creep in. A “bad experience” led her to move back to Montpellier at the end of 2018. She resumed training with her former coaches at the local training facility but stepped away entirely from high-level competition for nearly four years. “I worked various jobs in retail and childcare. I was training, but with no real goal,” she recalls.

During that time, Ilionis reconnected with her biological family in Haiti and dreamed of moving to the US to be closer to her island roots. Passing through Paris in late 2022 to get her visa for this move across the Atlantic, Ilionis received a call from fellow athlete and coach Louis-Grégory Occin, who talked her into training with him while she was in town. And stepping onto the warm-up track of the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games, right next to the official venue, the Stade de France, something shifted. “We started training and I thought, ‘Okay, I have some unfinished business with athletics’,” she smiles.

After a year spent “getting back in shape mentally and physically”, Ilionis made a thundering comeback, winning the 2024 French indoor national championship and finishing second in the outdoor competition. That momentum carried her to the European championships in June in Rome, where she won bronze with a 14m43 jump. At the Guadalajara meet, she set a personal best of 14m59 and secured her qualification for the Olympics. Back on the runway of the Stade de France, just steps from where she had restarted training two years earlier, Ilionis reached the triple jump finals of the Paris 2024 Games. “What a crazy year!” she beamed, amazed that just a few months earlier she had “struggled to clear 13 metres”. 
Her achievement feels all the more impressive considering she had stepped outside the national training system and was juggling intense training and work as a teacher’s assistant in the Paris suburbs to finance her coaching and travel.

This “seat of the pants” approach—improvising with the resources at hand—ran up against reality in the year after the Olympics, when life became more emotionally demanding. As the buzz surrounding the 2024 Paris Games faded, it was time to set new goals. That’s when the French Athletics Federation approached Ilionis with the idea of joining the SNCF Athletes Programme.

“Having a flexible schedule that allows me to balance my professional and athletic careers, and, more simply, to earn a salary at the end of the month, was life-changing,” says Ilionis. She joined SNCF Group in June 2025 as assistant customer service manager on the RER D line, a move that “allowed me to put more support and structure in place within my training team. That’s important because, ultimately, it’s details like these that can make all the difference in elite sport.” Ilionis now hopes this renewed balance will carry her to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where the triple jumper with many lives is eager to show her full potential—a culmination of the passion that began at the age of 7 on her local track in Fabrègues.