Ta Lou's first passion was association football before her elder brother convinced her to change to sprinting in 2008.

Friends of his suggested that if his sister enjoyed sports, she should take up athletics, as she was already regularly beating the boys in her class in sprints.

By the end of June 2007, she was part of the Ivorian 4 × 100 m team that won bronze at the West African Championships in Cotonou, Benin.

That year, she finished seventh in the 200 metre race at the 2009 West African Championships in Porto-Novo, Benin, with a time of 25.67 despite a 1.8 m/s headwind.

At the end of that summer, she was awarded a 4-year sports scholarship in China by the Ivory Coach Athletics Federation.

Her coach, Jeannot Kouamé, had pushed her to apply for the scholarship, as he viewed she had potential but felt she could not fulfill it if she stayed in the Ivory Coast.

Ta Lou and national teammate Wilfried Koffi (who would become double African champion in the 100 m and 200 m in 2014) moved to Shanghai at the end of the summer.

In 2013, Ta Lou won the 100 and 200 m at the Gabriel Tiacoh meet in front of a home crowd in Abidjan.

She competed in the World University Games in Kazan in July, reaching the semi-final in the 100 m and finishing eighth in the final of the 200 m in a time of 23.63.

She was also struggling to combine her athletics training and her studies in Shanghai, so in August, she decided to return to Ivory Coast.

[6] Her ex-coaches, Onolade and Kouamé, helped her try to enroll at one of the West African High Performance Training Centres in Lomé (Togo) or Dakar (Senegal).

Due to her results, she was selected for the African team at the IAAF Continental Cup in September, where she finished fourth in the 100 m in 11.28 and fifth in the 200 m in 22.78, another personal best.

In the 200 m, she lowered her personal best to 22.73 to win her heat, even though she ran with spikes borrowed from her friend Cynthia Bolingo.

At the African Games that year, she won a sprint double, with impressive times to offset the absence of both Blessing Okagbare and Murielle Ahouré.

She was named Best Female Athlete of the All-Africa Games and honoured at the ANOC Awards in Washington in November.

She was then injured at the Doha Diamond League meeting, hurting her left hamstring and being carried off the track by her opponents.

The London Diamond League went much better for Ta Lou because she ran 10.96, into headwinds, twice to win the 100 m. She also performed very well at the Rio Olympics.

Ta Lou finished with the same time as Shelly-Anne Fraser-Pryce in the 100 m final down to the hundredth of the second, and the Ivorian lost the bronze in a photo-finish by 0.007, 10.852 to 10.859.

She then won the Monaco Diamond League 200 m. She then returned home to Abidjan to anchor the 4 × 100 metre relay in the Francophone Games.