Aniol Ekai wins Spanish Semifinal, six athletes earn Games invites

Aniol Ekai did not win Spain’s Semifinal by blowing the field away in one workout. He won it by never letting the weekend get away from him, and at Quijote Arena in Ciudad Real that was enough to seize the MAD Fitness Festival title with 562 points and one of six individual invitations to the 2026 CrossFit Games.

That mattered because MAD was one of only two in-person Semifinals in Europe, and the last qualifying gate before San Jose. CrossFit’s 2026 Games will run July 24-26 at the SAP Center, so the athletes who survived this weekend did more than win a regional event. They claimed the final route into the season’s biggest stage.

Ekai’s margin came from control, not fireworks. He finished inside the top four in five of six events and never fell lower than ninth. In a weekend built to punish one bad score, that kind of steadiness was gold. Luis Cuellar proved the same point from the opposite angle, taking second overall without winning a single workout. In a Semifinal this deep, that is not an accident. It is proof that complete athletes can outlast flashier ones when the leaderboard starts tightening.

Calum Clements made the closing stretch count as hard as anyone. He scored a perfect 200 points across the final two events, shared the Beaded Sandbag win and then took CALATRAVA to lock up third place and a Games berth. That late kick was the sharpest finish of the weekend, the kind that reshapes a leaderboard when everybody else is fading.

The men’s fight also showed how little margin existed in Spain. Jonne Koski won FASTFOOT and CARCELERO, yet a 20th-place finish in The Ladder cost him the trip to San Jose by two points. Tatu Eeronheimo looked like the man to beat after winning MAD X and sharing FASTFOOT, but poor finishes in CARCELERO and CALATRAVA dropped him all the way to seventh. Spain did not just reward brilliance. It exposed how quickly a single collapse could erase it.

On the women’s side, Gabriela Migała won the division with 545 points and held off a field that sent Lucy McGonigle and Ella Wilkinson through with her. Together, the six individual qualifiers and team winner CrossFit Asker Kriger turned MAD into one of the decisive weekends of the season. In a European field this deep, surviving cleanly was the real separator.