Australian teenager Chloe Covell rounded out the SLS Sydney 2026 women's podium in third place, behind Brazilian Rayssa Leal and Japanese Liz Akama, and gave the home crowd at the Aware Super Theatre the result they had spent the night waiting for.
Covell's third place at the season-opening Street League stop is the latest in a growing collection of international podiums for the Gold Coast skater, whose career arc since her Paris 2024 Olympic appearance has been steeply upward. She has finished inside the top five at multiple SLS stops, contested the World Skateboarding Tour at elite level, and has begun to feature in the conversation about the women's Super Crown finalist field for the back end of 2026.
The Sydney result is, in conventional contest scoring terms, a strong opener. The Super Crown world championship at season's end is contested by the top eight women on the tour standings; a stop-one podium puts a skater clear of the qualification cut after the first event and means the rest of the season can be navigated with a margin for error.
Covell's run came in the back half of the Sydney women's final and her Best Trick combination was widely picked up by the local skate media as the moment that confirmed her podium. The technical quality of her run, in particular her commitment on the larger gap sections of the course, was the part that separated her from a chasing pack including American Poe Pinson and Japanese Aoi Uemura.
Leal won the contest with the kind of consistency that has defined her career, while Akama's second was a continuation of the form that earned her an Olympic medal in Paris in 2024. Covell behind them is now part of an elite women's three-country contest at the front of the women's field — Brazil, Japan and Australia.
The Sydney crowd's reaction to Covell's run was, by SLS broadcast standards, unusually loud. The Aware Super Theatre had been part-filled by an Australian skate community that has watched Covell's progression closely, and her podium ride-back was met with the kind of crowd response a home final-stop deserves but a home stop-one rarely gets.
Australian skateboarding's international footprint has been growing across the past five years. Keegan Palmer's Olympic gold medals in park and Hayley Wilson's consistent international results have already established a national presence at elite level. Covell adds the street-discipline dimension to that picture, and a 2026 Super Crown qualification — which her stop-one podium now makes statistically likely — would extend Australian women's representation at the season finale.
The Championship Tour now moves to Downtown Los Angeles, then Paris, then the Super Crown. Covell will travel with the rest of the elite women's tour and will arrive in each city carrying the same expectation: a podium contender, not a long-shot. The Sydney result confirmed it.
