Èrika Sellart Bordes: Spain’s Rising Force in the Javelin
There are athletes who spend years quietly accumulating results before the wider world takes notice, and then there is Èrika Sellart Bordes — a javelin thrower from the flatlands of western Catalonia who has been making noise since she was barely a teenager. Still only 18 years old and competing in her first year as a Sub-20 athlete, Sellart has already assembled one of the most decorated youth careers in the recent history of Spanish athletics, capped in early 2026 by her first senior national title. She is, without much debate, the most exciting young javelin thrower in Spain right now, and she is just getting started.
From Bellvís to the Throwing Circle
Èrika Sellart Bordes was born on June 15, 2007, in Bellvís, a small municipality in the comarca of Pla d’Urgell in the province of Lleida, Catalonia. Bellvís sits in the agricultural heart of western Catalonia, a quiet place better known for its orchards and irrigation channels than for producing international athletes — which makes Sellart’s trajectory all the more remarkable.
She began practicing athletics in 2011, when she was just four years old, laying the foundation for what would become a decade-long ascent through the sport. From the beginning, the javelin was her discipline, and she has never wavered from it. Her earliest competitive years were spent with Club Atletisme Terres de Ponent, the local club that first developed her talent, training at the athletics track in Mollerussa, a larger nearby town that served as the practical base for her formative years in the sport.
One of the most defining features of Sellart’s athletic development has been the family dimension at its core. Her coach and trainer throughout her youth career has been her father, Jaume Sellart, who built her technique from the ground up on those Mollerussa tracks. That father-daughter partnership produced results quickly and has remained a constant in her story. Equally notable is that athletics has become a genuine family affair: her younger sister, Àngela Sellart, has followed closely in her footsteps and is herself a competitive javelin thrower with considerable talent, already winning national youth titles in the Sub-16 category. In March 2025, the two sisters shared the podium at the same national championship event — Àngela taking gold in Sub-16 and Èrika silver in Sub-20 — a family moment that attracted well-deserved attention across the Catalan sports media.
Breaking Through: The Sub-16 Years (2021–2022)
Sellart’s competitive emergence began in earnest during 2022, when she was 14 and 15 years old and competing in the Sub-16 age category. The season was a sustained record-breaking campaign that announced her as one of the most significant young throwers in Spanish athletics.
The records started falling early. On January 23, 2022, competing at the Criterium de Lanzamientos de Invierno at the Estadio Joan Serrahima in Barcelona, she threw 45.00 meters and broke the Catalan Sub-16 javelin record, improving the previous mark by over two meters — a standard that had stood since 2006. She wasn’t done. On March 27, she improved the record to 45.10 meters at the Memorial Llorenç Cassi. Then, in the national winter throwing championships in Castellón, she raised it again to 45.33 meters and became Spain’s Sub-16 champion for the first time. On May 29, she threw 46.15 meters at the Trofeu 40 Aniversari AAC event in what would stand as both the Catalan and national Sub-16 record — her fourth improvement of the same mark inside a single calendar year.
The summer season brought further confirmation of her status. At the national Sub-16 outdoor championships in Avilés, Sellart was the clear favorite and won her second consecutive national title, throwing 44.78 meters — a distance short of her peak that season, but more than enough to claim the gold. By the end of 2022, Sellart had won the national Sub-16 winter championships, the national Sub-16 outdoor championships, both Sub-16 championships in Catalonia, and had broken her own Catalan record on four separate occasions. For an athlete who had just turned 15, it was a season of extraordinary productivity.
Stepping Up: The Sub-18 Era (2023–2024)
Entering the Sub-18 age group meant stiffer competition and a heavier implement — and Sellart responded by reaching new levels. In 2023, competing now with Avinent Manresa, she continued her habit of winning national youth titles. At the Sub-18 national championships held in Gijón in July, she won the gold medal with a throw of 48.65 meters, edging silver medalist Lara Iglesias by 28 centimeters in what was a closely contested final.
Her reward for that national title was selection for the Spanish team at the inaugural Campeonato Iberoamericano de Atletismo Sub-18, held in Lima, Peru, in September 2023. It was her first experience competing internationally for Spain, and she made the most of it. Sellart won the gold medal in the javelin with a throw of 47.33 meters, taking the top spot on the podium at an event that brought together the best Sub-18 athletes from Spain, Portugal, and the nations of Latin America. The title made her the first-ever Ibero-American Sub-18 javelin champion for Spain, and images of a beaming Sellart with her gold medal at the Lima athletics stadium circulated widely in the Catalan sports press.
The 2024 season brought continued progress. Now competing with the Valencia Club Atletismo, she had already posted a personal best of 50.13 meters in January at a meet in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, inching her over the psychologically significant 50-meter barrier for the first time. In July, at the national Sub-18 championships held in Málaga, she threw 49.72 meters to finish as runner-up — the silver medal a slight step back from the gold of 2023, but a strong performance nonetheless as her transition into a more competitive age bracket accelerated.
That summer silver qualified her for Spain’s team at the European Athletics Under-18 Championships in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, held in July 2024. Sellart competed well, throwing 49.48 meters in the final to place seventh — a result that illustrated both how far she had come and how much room remained to grow at the continental level. The gold that day went to Croatian thrower Vida Barbic, who launched the javelin an imposing 61.07 meters, a performance that put the European elite in sharp context. Still, seventh in Europe at age 16 was a solid foundation to build on.
The Sub-20 Years Begin: Breaking Through to the Absolute Level (2025–2026)
Sellart turned 18 in June 2025 and entered the Sub-20 age group — but she wasn’t content to stay within her age bracket. By mid-year she was competing and winning against senior athletes, and the results confirmed that her youth achievements were the beginning of something much larger.
In August 2025, competing at the Campeonato de España Absoluto in Tarragona — Spain’s senior national championship — Sellart won the bronze medal with a throw of 50.00 meters, her personal best at the time. It was her first medal at the absolute level of Spanish athletics, stepping onto the senior podium for the first time while still a first-year Sub-20 competitor. Two years prior, in her debut at the senior nationals, she had finished fourth; now she was on the podium. The gold that day went to Arantza Moreno with 53.15 meters, and the silver to Enya Carretero with 50.93, but Sellart’s bronze at just 18 was a clear statement of intent. Her 50-meter throw also secured the qualifying standard for the upcoming European Athletics Championships.
The winter 2026 season opened even more dramatically. After claiming the Catalan javelin title with a throw of 48.98 meters, Sellart traveled to Castellón for the Campeonato de España de Lanzamientos Largos de Invierno — the national winter throwing championships — in February 2026. There, she produced the best performance of her career. In her very first attempt of the competition, she launched the javelin 51.14 meters, a new personal best that also set a new Catalan Sub-20 record. No other competitor in the senior women’s final came close to 51 meters: Paula Redondo was second at 49.37 meters and Enya Carretero third at 48.85. Sellart had won her first senior national title, at 18 years of age, while technically still competing as a Sub-20 athlete. She also contested the Sub-20 final at the same Castellón event, where she entered as the strong favorite.
With that 51.14-meter mark, Sellart rose to 235th in the World Athletics women’s javelin rankings as of early 2026 — a relatively modest international position that reflects how deep the global field is, but one that is still moving in the right direction for an 18-year-old. Her World Athletics profile lists the 51.14 as her senior personal best and the 49.72 throw from the 2024 Sub-18 nationals as her best with the lighter 500-gram implement used in youth competition.
Club History and Development
Sellart’s club affiliations trace a natural path through the Spanish athletics system. She began at CA Terres de Ponent, the local club in the Pla d’Urgell region that first gave her competitive experience. She then moved to Avinent Manresa, one of the more prominent multi-sport clubs in Catalonia, under whose colors she competed during the pivotal years of her Sub-18 career, including her Ibero-American gold in Lima and her 2023 Spanish Sub-18 title. More recently she has competed with Diputació València Club Atletisme (also known as Valencia Club Atletismo), one of Spain’s better-funded athletics clubs, which has provided her with the institutional support and competitive environment needed to make the jump to the senior level.
The role of her father, Jaume Sellart, as her coach has been central throughout. Reports from the local Catalan media consistently note his presence at competitions alongside his daughters, and the family dynamic — father coaching both Èrika and younger sister Àngela — has been a recurring and warmly noted human-interest thread in coverage of her career.
Career Honors and Competitive Record
By the end of the 2025–26 winter season, Sellart had accumulated one of the most impressive youth résumés in Spanish throwing history. Her national championship medal count across all age categories runs to more than a dozen, including two gold medals in Sub-16 (indoor winter and outdoor summer, both 2022), a bronze in Sub-18 winter, a gold and two silvers in Sub-18 outdoor (2023 gold in Gijón, 2024 silver in Málaga, and a winter bronze), a silver and a bronze in Sub-20, and — most recently — her 2026 absolute national winter title. At the international level she has represented Spain at the inaugural Ibero-American U18 Championships (gold, Lima 2023) and the European U18 Championships (seventh, Banská Bystrica 2024), with the 2025 absolute Spanish bronze qualifying her for a fourth international appearance.
Her personal best progression tells a clear upward story: from 45.33 meters in the winter of 2022 to 46.15 later that spring, then 48.65 at the 2023 Sub-18 nationals, past 50.00 in January 2024, and up to the current mark of 51.14 set in February 2026. Each major season has brought a new ceiling.
Social Media and Public Profile
Sellart maintains an active social media presence that has grown rapidly alongside her competitive profile. Her Instagram account, @erikaasellartt, had accumulated more than 22,000 followers as of early 2026, where she identifies herself simply as an “international athlete.” She is also present on TikTok, where content related to her performances and athletic life has attracted significant organic attention, including viral clips that have introduced her to audiences far beyond Spain’s domestic athletics community. No formal sponsorship arrangements have been publicly confirmed as of this writing, though her growing profile and competitive trajectory make commercial partnerships a natural next step in the near future.
Looking Ahead
The context for Sellart’s development is worth appreciating. She is 18 years old, still eligible for Sub-20 competition through the 2026 season, and she is already winning senior national titles and qualifying for senior European Championships. The Spanish javelin has historically been a difficult event for the country’s women to crack at the international level, and a thrower with Sellart’s competitive instincts, family support structure, and clear technical trajectory arriving at this juncture is exactly the kind of foundational story that tends to produce a senior international career of real significance.
She grew up throwing javelins on a club track in Mollerussa under her father’s guidance, in a small Catalan town that most Spanish sports fans couldn’t place on a map. Now she is the national champion of Spain in the absolute category, with a European championships qualification already in hand. The next chapters — Sub-20 Europeans, U20 Worlds, and eventually a push for the senior continental and global stages — are there to be written. If the first decade of her career is any guide, she’ll write them well.
Personal bests: Javelin (600g): 51.14m (February 20, 2026, Castellón) | Javelin 500g: 49.72m (July 6, 2024, Málaga)
World Athletics profile: worldathletics.org/athletes/spain/erika-sellart-14970823
Instagram: @erikaasellartt
