Lika Kharchilava

LEGENDS ONLY: Happy birthday to Georgia’s Lika Kharchilava, a sprinter whose career already includes an Olympic Games and seven Georgian national titles.

Across her 2026 indoor season Lika ran the fastest race of her life: 7.70 over 60m at the Athletics Indoor Arena in Tbilisi in February, a lifetime best. She had opened that season at the Balkan Indoor Championships in Belgrade, and the year before she had raced the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn and gone to the Balkan Championships in Volos, where she brought her 200m best down to 25.09.

Throughout her career Lika has carried an entire event group largely on her own. She has four Georgian outdoor titles and three Georgian indoor titles, and in August 2024 she ran the 100m at the Olympic Games in Paris, one of twenty-eight Georgians across all sports at those Games and her country’s woman on the biggest start line in the sport. Georgia is a nation of a little over three and a half million people with no professional sprint circuit to speak of, and getting one athlete from that pool onto an Olympic 100m start list is not a small thing. For a decade of Georgian girls who watched it happen, she is the proof it is possible.

And the fastest race is the most recent one. A 60m personal best set this February, six years on from her first national titles, says there is more still to come.

გილოცავთ დაბადების დღეს, ლიკა! გისურვებ ბედნიერებას, სიხარულს და ჯანმრთელობას. მრავალს დაესწარი! ლიკას გაუმარჯოს! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇬🇪