The last time the Championship Tour held a contest at Cloudbreak, we were all left a bit disappointed. The decision to move the 2025 WSL Finals to Fiji made it one of the most anticipated contests of the whole year, and then the event window came with a pretty bleak forecast. It’s not that the waves were bad, it just didn’t live up to the kind of hopes we hold for crowning a champion at a world-class left-hander in the South Pacific.
Well, things feel a little different this time around. The WSL was gifted with a promising swell window to kick things off at the 2026 Fiji Pro and a decision they love being faced with: run in good surf or potentially hold out for a banger of a swell at the end of the contest period.
Rounds one and two have been crossed off the list right away for the men with just two surfers in the top 10 heading home early. That’s leaving things pretty tight at the top of the CT in a critical contest. The entire roster is about to be cut down to 24 men and 16 women in Portugal and either Abu Dhabi or the Philippines, then everybody comes back together at Pipe to decide the world champions. The surfer on the men’s side leading that race is Italo Ferreira, who won his last world title in a dramatic winner-take-all heat at Pipe (the heat that inspired the WSL to cook up the WSL Finals experiment). He’s made a semifinal or better four times this season.
“I’ve been a bit injured, so at the start I was still testing myself, and if I could still rip, and then once I felt good, I got that nice one, and it just went on from there,” Ferreira said. “My board hit my face in a freesurf the other day, and it was hard to breathe through one side, so I’m glad to be feeling better and have a few days to recover before my heat. That’s just part of it, though. I wanted to slow down in the heat because in Tahiti I was too excited and I was catching a lot of waves, but this time I was thinking, you’ve got priority, just wait. And that helped me improve. It was fun out there, so I’m looking forward to another one.”
Gabriel Medina is another surfer in the men’s field people are keeping an eye on. After two early exits in Rio and Tahiti, his shot at a title run was slipping away. His Round two win over Joel Vaughan Wednesday was anything but small, keeping him alive in a field that has just over 11,000 points sitting between him (No. 5) and the yellow jersey (Ferreira).
“It’s been a challenging year for me with a lot of things happening in my life, but that’s life; everyone has their things going on, and you just have to deal with it,” Medina said. “I just wanted to overcome a lot of things that I’ve been dealing with, and now I’m feeling good and am in a good space. Now I just want to surf, and this place is the perfect place for me, and I can’t wait to enjoy the journey.”
