Brazilian surf fans who attended the festivities of the Rio Pro had been used to walking away happy — until last year. When Cole Houshmand won in 2025, it was the first time a Brazilian hadn’t taken out the men’s event since John John Florence won in 2016. Yago Dora made sure they did not leave disappointed this year and corrected the history of Brazilian champions in Saquarema, winning the event for the second time.
Dora stomped a backside, no grab, full rotation air in the final to earn an 8.5. His heat total of 15 bested Leo Fioravanti’s 13.17, moving him up to third in the overall rankings. As the season hits its midway point, Dora continues to show that his 2025 title during Gabriel Medina’s tour absence was no fluke. Less than a thousand points behind rankings leader Fioravanti, Dora is in a good position to make another title run in the back half of the season with venues that he’s already won at, like Trestles and Fiji (in the Final 5).
Coming off his first Championship Tour win, Leo Fioravanti continued his best-ever run of surfing with his runner-up result in Brazil. The Italian will head to the next stop, Tahiti, donning the yellow jersey for the rankings leaders. Maintaining his position won’t be easy, as the Brazilian storm — Italo Ferreira, Dora, Medina, Miguel Pupo, and Samuel Pupo — follow in close pursuit on the rankings.
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On the women’s side, fifth-place finishes in Brazil for Gabriela Bryan and Carissa Moore maintained their respective first and second spots on the leaderboard. But Sawyler Lindblad rose three places to third overall after securing her maiden CT win in Brazil. The 20-year-old Californian had lost her previous three finals, but this time mustered enough points, 7.67, to best Tya Zebrowski’s total of 6.10 in the rookie’s first-ever final.
Lindblad has forcefully thrust herself into the conversations around the up-and-coming generation of women surfers on tour. Even competing among proven world champs who all got their own parts in Red Bull’s Now Days film — Caroline Marks, Caity Simmers, Molly Picklum — Lindblad has shown a competitive prowess that is impossible to ignore. She has a win, a second, and two thirds on the season, gunning for a title just a year after she missed the mid-season cut.
If she wants to declare herself as a legitimate title contender, she’ll need to perform at the upcoming heavy reef breaks on the schedule: Tahiti, Fiji, and Pipeline. In her first two seasons on tour, she made the quarterfinals at Pipe and Tahiti, indicating that she is capable. Reef breaks aside, a stop at her home break of Trestles should help her in the rankings.
For the first time this season, the tour surfers will all get a chance to go home and rest. Tahiti starts on August 8, giving them a full six weeks of downtime. Given that Pipeline’s points will be weighted 1.5 times the other events, the title will remain more open than it ever has as the season enters its second half.
