El Salvador Olympic Committee (Spanish: Comité Olímpico de El Salvador) confirmed a team of eight athletes, five men and three women, to compete in six sports at the Games.[2] This was also the youngest delegation in El Salvador's Summer Olympic history, with more than half under the age of 25, and many of them expected to reach their peak in time for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
The majority of El Salvador's athletes made their Olympic debut in Rio de Janeiro, with weightlifter Julio Salamanca being the only sportsman to return for his second appearance from London 2012. Other notable Salvadoran athletes featured Enrique Arathoon, the nation's first ever sailor for nearly half a century, and Marcelo Acosta, bronze medalist in long-distance freestyle swimming at the Youth Olympics in Nanjing two years earlier. Air pistol shooter Lilian Castro, the oldest member of the squad (aged 29), acted as El Salvador's flag bearer in the opening ceremony.[1][3]
El Salvador, however, was yet to win its first Olympic medal at the end of the 2016 Summer Games.
El Salvador qualified one judoka for the men's half-middleweight category (81 kg) at the Games. Juan Diego Turcios earned a continental quota spot from the Pan American region, as El Salvador's top-ranked judoka outside of direct qualifying position in the IJF World Ranking List of 30 May 2016.[6][7]
El Salvador qualified a boat in men's Laser class by virtue of a top finish for Central & South America at the 2015 Pan American Games, signifying the nation's Olympic return to the sport for the first time since 1968.[8]
El Salvador qualified one shooter in the women's pistol events by virtue of her best finish at the 2014 American Continental Championships, and other selection competitions, as long as she obtained a minimum qualifying score (MQS) by 31 March 2016.[9][10][11]
Salvadoran swimmers have so far achieved qualifying standards in the following events (up to a maximum of 2 swimmers in each event at the Olympic Qualifying Time (OQT), and potentially 1 at the Olympic Selection Time (OST)):[12][13][14]
El Salvador received an unused quota place from IWF to send a male weightlifter to the Olympics, as a response to the complete ban of the Russian weightlifting team from the Games due to "multiple positive" cases of doping.[15]
