Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck

Belgian hurdler | Born: July 12, 2002, Anderlecht, Brussels, Belgium | Club: Royal Excelsior Sports Club Brussels (RESC) | University: UCLA Bruins

Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck’s story is not a straight line. It is a story of a girl born in Anderlecht, one of Brussels’ most densely populated communes, who grew up in France, competed under three different flags before settling on one, earned a university scholarship on the other side of the Atlantic, battled a concussion and a migraine disorder, nearly qualified for a European Championship she desperately wanted, fell on the last hurdle of an NCAA indoor final — and came back, year after year, until she reached the place she always believed she belonged: the Belgian national record books, the World Championships semifinals, and the podium at the NCAA’s most prestigious meet. At 23, she is among the finest women’s hurdlers Belgium has ever produced, and the trajectory suggests she is not finished yet.

Origins: Brussels, by Way of Cameroon and France

Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck was born on July 12, 2002, in Anderlecht, one of nineteen municipalities that make up the Brussels Capital Region and a historically working-class area of the Belgian capital. Her family is of Cameroonian descent — Cameroon is sometimes called “Africa in miniature” for its extraordinary cultural and geographic diversity, and the Cameroonian diaspora in Brussels is one of the larger African communities in the Belgian capital. Her parents, Roger and Ginette Ndjip-Nyemeck, are the central figures in her athletic story; they feature prominently in her college athletics profile, where she is simply described as “daughter of Roger and Ginette Ndjip-Nyemeck,” a short phrase that carries obvious warmth.

When Yanla was twelve years old, the family relocated to France, and it was there that her athletic career began to take shape in earnest. She came under the umbrella of the Royal Racing Club Bruxelles (RRCB), a Belgian club that kept her registered with the Belgian athletics federation (LBFA) while she was competing and training in France. This dual arrangement — Belgian affiliation, French competition — shaped her early competitive record in interesting ways. She would compete at French youth championships while her performances were tracked on Belgian all-time lists, and the cross-border nature of her early career foreshadowed the international dimensions that would define her entire athletic life.

Her athletic idols, as she listed them when she arrived in the United States, are a revealing combination: Allyson Felix’s longevity and grace, Kendra Harrison’s blazing 100m hurdles world record, and Dina Asher-Smith’s eloquence both on and off the track. The combination of sprint power, technical excellence, and a broader understanding of what it means to represent a country well — those values clearly resonated with a young athlete who was already navigating a complicated national and cultural identity.

Youth Career: Breaking Records in Two Countries

Yanla’s talent announced itself early. At the French cadettes and juniors indoor championships in Liévin, she won the under-18 title in the 60 metres hurdles in a time of 8.35 seconds — a mark that equalled her own Belgian federation record in the event and was, at the time of that competition, the third-fastest mark by any European under-18 athlete that year. The Royal Racing Club Bruxelles celebrated the result on their website, noting not just the French title but how the performance placed her on the continental scale. For a teenager competing across borders, it was a statement.

The records continued. In 2018, she traveled back to Belgium to compete at the Belgian Under-18 Indoor National Championships in the 60 metres hurdles, winning the race in 8.38 seconds. That alone would have been a fine result, but 2019 brought something more remarkable: she set the Belgian U18 record in the 60 metres hurdles at 8.26 seconds, a mark that at the time was also the fastest by any under-18 girl in the world in the 30-inch hurdle event. To hold a world age-group lead, even briefly, is the kind of distinction that tends to follow an athlete. Years later, when she arrived at California State University, Northridge, and athletic departments and sports websites were describing her background, that world-leading U18 mark was always mentioned. It was her calling card, and it earned it.

By 2019, she was also recording high school bests of 11.84 in the 100 metres and 24.64 in the 200 metres — sprint foundation times that reflected genuine pace, not just hurdle-specific talent. She was, even then, an athlete with options: fast enough over the flat to have pursued a sprinting career, technically gifted enough over the barriers to become a specialist. She had already chosen the barriers.

Moving to America: The CSUN Years

In 2019, Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck made the move that would shape the next chapter of her career: she relocated to the United States. Her long-term aspiration was to study medicine — a field she had her eye on even as a teenager — but medicine in the American system is pursued at the graduate level after an undergraduate degree. At CSUN, she enrolled as an electrical engineering major (she would later change course). She was attracted to California State University, Northridge by the coaching staff and the environment the program offered, and she graduated from St. Anthony High School in Long Beach, California, in 2020, summa cum laude — a detail worth pausing on. Academic achievement was not incidental to her story.

Her first year at CSUN (2021) was lost to the disruptions of the pandemic; she did not compete. But 2022 saw her explode onto the NCAA scene in a manner that suggested she had been storing up energy for exactly this moment. In her outdoor season as a redshirt freshman, she lowered the CSUN school record, freshman record, and Big West Conference record in the 100 metres hurdles to 13.02 seconds, placing 13th in the second round of the NCAA West Regional — a strong debut in a ferociously competitive environment. In the 200 metres, she ran a season-best of 23.91 at the Big West Championship, finishing second and landing in the top four among the fastest freshmen in school history at that distance. She won the 200 metres at the CSUN Invitational that season as well. The Big West Conference named her Academic All-Conference — high marks in the classroom alongside the results on the track.

What the 2022 outdoor season made clear was that Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck had outgrown CSUN’s competitive tier. She was already posting marks that suggested she could compete at the highest levels of NCAA athletics, and the University of California, Los Angeles offered her exactly that.

The Transfer to UCLA: A New Level

Yanla’s decision to transfer to UCLA was deliberate and clearly considered. In her own words, she made the choice because the American system allowed her to integrate elite sport with ambitious academic goals — she had pivoted from engineering toward sociology as her undergraduate major, with medical school remaining the eventual target. The UCLA athletic program, one of the most storied in American collegiate sports history, offered resources, coaching, and visibility that CSUN simply could not match. Joanna Hayes, the 2004 Olympic 100 metres hurdles gold medallist, would eventually become the director of the UCLA track and field program, giving Ndjip-Nyemeck access to coaching from one of the greatest in the event’s history. The UCLA campus in Westwood, Los Angeles, placed her in one of the world’s premier athletics environments.

Her first indoor season with the Bruins (2023) was, by any measure, exceptional. All eleven of her marks in the 60 metres hurdles that winter were fast enough to crack UCLA’s indoor all-time top ten. She settled in at second on the all-time list, behind only Dawn Harper — a 2008 Olympic gold medallist and Hall of Famer — who had run 7.98 in 2006. Ndjip-Nyemeck ran 8.01 in the preliminary round of the NCAA indoor national championships, which earned her First Team All-American status and announced her arrival emphatically. She was now ranked among the best collegiate hurdlers in the country. The same winter, she had narrowly missed the 8.03 standard for European Indoor Championship qualification by two hundredths of a second — a bitter miss that she acknowledged honestly, noting the chrono had been in her legs but not on the scoreboard when it counted. A week after that European Indoor qualifying window closed, she ran the 8.01 she had been chasing. The timing felt cruelly precise. She took the experience as a lesson rather than a loss.

During that same 2023 indoor season, she fell on the last hurdle in the NCAA national final — a fall that carried physical consequences. She sustained a concussion that kept her off the track for a month, and the combination of that injury, an exam period, and her pre-existing history of migraines made the transition to the outdoor season a difficult one. She was candid about it: the concussion had disrupted her training continuity, and without full confidence in her body, it was hard to perform at peak level. And yet, even through those difficulties, she broke the 13-second barrier in the 100 metres hurdles for the first time — running 12.99 in the preliminary round of the NCAA West Regional meet, becoming only the fifth Belgian woman ever to run sub-13 at the time. She also finished seventh in the semifinals at the European U23 Championships in Espoo, Finland, in July 2023. That trip to Finland doubled as a birthday celebration — she turned 21 while competing in Espoo.

Belgian National Champion and International Debut

July 2023 was a landmark month in more ways than one. At the Belgian Athletics Championships in Bruges, Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck won the national title in the 100 metres hurdles — her first Belgian national championship. She had been competing for Belgium since her youth, but claiming the senior outdoor title was a different kind of confirmation. Back in Brussels, she is registered with the Royal Excelsior Sports Club Brussels (RESC), and her connection to Belgian athletics remained a thread running through all her years in California.

Her Belgian home federation remained closely engaged with her development. When she was training in Belgium, she worked with coaches Juan Da Silva and Leopold Kapata, who would implement the training program designed at UCLA and communicate with her American coaches to ensure continuity. For a period, she also had the opportunity to train alongside Anne Zagré — Belgium’s most decorated women’s hurdler, a triple Olympian and, at that point, the holder of the Belgian 100 metres hurdles record. The chance to train with Zagré was something Ndjip-Nyemeck has described as invaluable. They had maintained contact since her younger years; Zagré had been a mentor figure she could call on for advice. The generational continuity in Belgian hurdles talent — from Eline Berings, who won the European indoor title in 2009, to Zagré, who carried the flag at three Olympic Games, to Ndjip-Nyemeck now pressing on the records both of them set — is one of the more quietly impressive threads in Belgian athletics.

The 2024 World Indoor Championships: Glasgow

With a Belgian indoor personal best of 8.01, the 2024 World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow presented Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck with her first senior World Championship appearance. She arrived in Scotland describing herself as “a bit in awe” of sharing hotel space with athletes she had admired growing up — a characteristically candid admission that spoke to both her youth and her self-awareness. Her stated first objective was experience. Her actual objective, as she made clear in interviews, was a result.

The Glasgow Championships did not go as she had hoped. In her heat, she clipped a hurdle and fell, crashing out in the most heartbreaking fashion possible — the precise circumstances that had ended her 2023 indoor NCAA final were repeating themselves. “It can happen to anyone,” she told reporters afterward, and her reaction was to turn the page quickly rather than dwell. The fall in Glasgow stung, but she had already demonstrated a capacity to absorb adversity and return to competition with her confidence intact. That resilience would prove essential in the seasons ahead.

2025: The Year Everything Came Together

If 2023 and 2024 were years of progress punctuated by near-misses and hard knocks, 2025 was the year Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck showed what she was truly capable of when everything aligned. The outdoor season was extraordinary.

It began with a strong indoor campaign, including fourteen races across 60 metres hurdles between mid-January and mid-March, and a mark of 8.06 that placed her close to her personal best. She ended the 2025 indoor season with a place in the NCAA indoor final. The outdoor transition was clean, and by April she was already sharpening to a new level.

At the Mt. SAC Relays in Walnut, California — one of the most respected invitational meets in American track and field — she ran 12.87 in the 100 metres hurdles, a personal best by twelve hundredths and, at the time, the third-fastest performance in Belgian history. She had surpassed both Elisabeth Davin (12.97) and Sara Aerts (12.90) in the national rankings, and now only Zagré (12.71) and Berings (12.72) stood ahead of her. She was running second to former world record holder Kendra Harrison in that race — a marker of the company she was now keeping — and she took her time to 12.87 in lane 8, a detail that underscores how clean her execution was. It was only the second time in her career she had run sub-13.

Then came the 2025 NCAA Outdoor Championships in Eugene, Oregon — Hayward Field, one of the sport’s holiest venues — and a performance that landed her in the history books. In the semifinals on June 12, 2025, she ran 12.71 seconds with a wind reading of +1.5 metres per second. The time equalled the Belgian national record set by Anne Zagré in 2015 — a mark that had stood for a decade. Ndjip-Nyemeck, speaking to reporters at trackside, said she had not been focused on the clock; she was simply trying to execute well, qualify for the final, and run her own race. When she saw the 12.71 on the scoreboard, she described her reaction as “wow” — a record, and a World Championship qualifying standard (the Tokyo minimum was 12.73), achieved in the same race. Three things at once: personal best, national record, and global qualifier, all in a semifinal she wasn’t even thinking about in record terms. She advanced to the NCAA final, where she finished in the top ranks of American collegiate hurdles competition — a result that confirmed her position as one of the sport’s emerging names.

The summer that followed brought more milestones. At the World University Games in Germany, she placed fourth in the 100 metres hurdles final in 12.96 seconds — one hundredth away from the bronze medal. And in September 2025, she stood on the starting line at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo — the Olympic Stadium, one of the sport’s great stages — and ran through the preliminary rounds and into the semifinals, becoming a World Championship semifinalist for the first time in her career. She ran 12.74 in her heat, advancing comfortably. The semifinal was where her championships ended, but reaching it placed her among the world’s top twenty women hurdlers at a major global championship, a meaningful statement for a 22-year-old Belgian competing in arguably the world’s strongest sprint hurdle event.

2026: Closing the Collegiate Chapter at the Highest Level

Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck began the 2026 indoor season as a graduate student at UCLA — her final year of collegiate eligibility — and the season quickly established that she was peaking at exactly the right moment. She was, at points during the winter, ranked number one in the country in the 60 metres hurdles among all NCAA competitors. The Big Ten Indoor Championships saw her finish as runner-up in the 60 metres hurdles, adding conference hardware to go with her eight total conference medals across her career (four Big Ten, two Pac-12, two Big West).

At the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Invitational in Albuquerque, she ran 7.96 seconds in the 60 metres hurdles — a school record for UCLA and a new personal best, and a performance that secured her spot in the 2026 NCAA Indoor Championships. She was the eighth seed heading to Fayetteville, Arkansas, and the Randal Tyson Track Center.

On March 13, 2026, in the preliminary round of the NCAA indoor championships, she matched her 7.96 personal best — tying for the fastest time among all competitors in the prelims. The next day, in the final, she dropped four hundredths of a second further, running 7.92 to claim the silver medal behind Aaliyah McCormick’s winning 7.86. The 7.92 equalled the Belgian indoor national record set by Eline Berings in 2009 — the day Berings won the European indoor title in Turin. It also earned Ndjip-Nyemeck her third First Team All-American honour in the 60 metres hurdles (2023, 2025, 2026), the first NCAA medal of her collegiate career, and joint ownership of the Belgian indoor all-time record. She closed her collegiate career holding school records at UCLA in the indoor 60 metres hurdles (7.92) and co-holding the all-time Belgian outdoor record in the 100 metres hurdles alongside the very athlete who inspired her in Brussels — Anne Zagré.

A week after the NCAA final, she traveled to Toruń, Poland, to represent Belgium at the 2026 World Athletics Indoor Championships. Speaking to Belgian media ahead of the competition, she was characteristically direct about the target: a final would require a record. She reached the semifinals, a meaningful step forward from her 2024 Glasgow experience, where she had fallen in the heats. The progression was real and visible.

The Coach Who Changed the Equation

The name Joanna Hayes appears in Ndjip-Nyemeck’s 2025 interviews alongside the Belgian national record celebration. Hayes — the 2004 Athens Olympic 100 metres hurdles gold medallist, a UCLA alumna who returned to her alma mater as director of track and field — has been central to Yanla’s development during her UCLA years. To be coached by an Olympic champion in your own event, at a program built around that event’s history (Gail Devers ran 12.61 there in 1988, still the all-time UCLA record Ndjip-Nyemeck has been chasing), is an unusual advantage. That connection between athlete and coach, between the specific technical demands of the 100 metres hurdles and an instructor who ran the event at its highest level, has clearly accelerated what was already a considerable natural gift.

The Person Behind the Performance

The picture of Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck that emerges from the totality of her career is of an athlete who is unusually self-aware for her age, who processes disappointment constructively, and who carries ambitious long-term goals in both sport and life with apparent ease. She has spoken openly about her migraine history and the role it played in disrupting her early UCLA outdoor season. She has described the fall at the 2024 Worlds with a pragmatism that does not minimize the difficulty but refuses to let it define the narrative. Her advice to young athletes, as listed in her CSUN athletics profile, was simple and direct: “Hard work always pays off.”

Her academic ambitions are genuine. She moved from engineering to sociology at the undergraduate level, with the goal of eventually pursuing medicine — a path she has described as something she has wanted since she was young. The choice of sociology as a bridge degree, in America’s graduate medical school system, reflects a pragmatic intelligence about how to navigate complex systems toward a long-term goal. She has done so while maintaining Academic All-Conference honours in college athletics, no minor achievement given the demands of a serious NCAA hurdles program.

In Belgium, she is registered with the Royal Excelsior Sports Club Brussels — the RESC — a historic Brussels club that has supported her international career while she has been building her future in California. When she returns to Belgium, she trains with local coaches who implement her UCLA program; the cross-continental coordination of her preparation is itself a logistical achievement that speaks to the organizational care invested in her development.

Her musical favourites include Alicia Keys — something she has mentioned alongside her athletic role models — and her favourite films are listed as Criminal Minds and Bad Boys, a combination that says she has eclectic taste and a healthy sense of humor about the genres she enjoys. She is known to teammates and coaches as “Yani,” the shortened name that appears in her Instagram bio.

Personal Bests and Statistics

Selected Career Highlights

• 2017/18: Won French cadettes indoor title, 60m hurdles (8.35); won Belgian U18 indoor title, 60m hurdles (8.38)
• 2019: Set Belgian U18 record in 60m hurdles (8.26); held fastest world U18 mark at the time
• 2022 (CSUN): Set CSUN school, freshman, and Big West records in 100m hurdles (13.02); Academic All-Conference
• 2023 (UCLA, indoor): 8.01 in 60m hurdles — second-fastest indoor mark in UCLA history at the time; First Team All-American
• 2023 (outdoor): First sub-13 100m hurdles (12.99); won Belgian senior 100m hurdles title (Bruges); made international debut at European U23 Championships (Espoo), 7th in semifinals
• 2024: Competed at World Athletics Indoor Championships (Glasgow); 8th in NCAA indoor final (60mH); 200m personal best of 23.91
• 2025 (April): 12.87 100m hurdles at Mt. SAC Relays — Belgian all-time #3 at the time
• 2025 (June): Equalled Belgian national record 12.71 (+1.5) in NCAA Championships semifinals at Hayward Field; earned World Championship qualifying standard in same race; 3× All-American honour
• 2025 (July): 4th place, World University Games (Germany), 100m hurdles (12.96)
• 2025 (September): Semifinalist, World Athletics Championships, Tokyo (heat: 12.74, advancing from round 1)
• 2026 (March): Silver medal, NCAA Indoor Championships, 60m hurdles (7.92 =Belgian indoor NR =UCLA school record); First Team All-American for third time; reached semifinals at World Athletics Indoor Championships (Toruń, Poland)
• World Rankings: #54, women’s 100m hurdles (World Athletics)
• Belgian Records Co-held: 100m hurdles outdoor (12.71, shared with Anne Zagré); 60m hurdles indoor (7.92, shared with Eline Berings)

Clubs and Affiliations

Belgian club: Royal Excelsior Sports Club Brussels (RESC). American university: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA Bruins). Previous American affiliation: California State University, Northridge (CSUN Matadors, 2020–2022). Earlier Belgian youth affiliation: Royal Racing Club Bruxelles (RRCB).

Social Media

Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck can be followed on Instagram at @yanlaaa_, where she describes herself as “Belgian hurdler x 237 national record holder.” Her World Athletics profile is maintained at worldathletics.org under athlete code 14763345. Her Instagram bio note “237” is a reference to Cameroon’s international dialing code — a quiet acknowledgment of where her family’s roots lie.

Looking Ahead

Yanla Ndjip-Nyemeck completed her NCAA eligibility with the 2026 indoor season, closing her collegiate chapter with school records, All-American honours, and a shared Belgian national record. She is now 23 years old and entering the years when hurdlers typically reach full maturity. The Belgian national record of 12.71 is already hers — she shares it with Zagré, whose career she has followed since childhood. Berings’ indoor mark of 7.92 is also jointly hers now, matched in the biggest collegiate race of her career. The question is not whether she will continue to improve, but by how much and how quickly. The 2026 World Athletics Indoor Championships in Toruń was her first appearance in the semifinals of a global senior indoor championship. The 2027 outdoor season will likely bring a full professional campaign, and with it, the sustained competitive environment that tends to accelerate growth in athletes at this stage of development.

She has spoken of wanting to eventually go to medical school — a goal that has been consistent through all the moves, all the universities, all the injuries and record-breaking moments. That ambition, combined with the record-holding hurdling career she is building, makes her one of the more interesting figures in Belgian athletics: a woman who has chosen to be very good at two very demanding things simultaneously, and who appears to be succeeding at both.