Griffin and Crosby Colapinto will meet for the third time on the Championship Tour at the Corona Cero New Zealand Pro, with the San Clemente brothers level at one heat win each on the WSL's main stage and a Round 3 berth on the line at Raglan.
The World Surf League's pre-event feature on the pair framed the rivalry as one of the most unusual on tour — a sibling head-to-head between two surfers who travel together, train together and share a coach, but who switch into competition mode the moment a jersey goes on. Their first CT meeting went the way of older brother Griffin; the second to Crosby. The third is on for Round 3 of the New Zealand Pro at Manu Bay.
The WSL drew parallels to the Irons brothers from Hawaii's North Shore and the Hobgoods from Florida, two of the most celebrated brother acts in the sport's recent history. Both those pairs delivered some of the most charged inter-family heats on tour through the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the Colapintos' clash carries a similar undercurrent of mutual respect and unfiltered competitive intent.
Griffin Colapinto, the elder brother and a former world No. 2, has been a mainstay of the top 10 for several seasons and remains one of the most complete all-round surfers on tour. Crosby, four years younger, qualified onto the main tour from the Challenger Series and has been one of the breakout stories of the early 2026 season, riding his way into mid-table after a difficult rookie campaign in 2025.
Manu Bay's long left will favour the surfer who can string together rail manoeuvres without losing speed through the flat middle section. Both brothers have refined their backhand surfing over winters spent on the North Shore of Hawaii and at the southern ends of Australia, but their styles have drifted apart. Griffin tends towards bigger, more drawn-out turns; Crosby towards a more punchy, tight-radius approach that has been compared to Italo Ferreira's.
Neither brother gave away much in the pre-event preview, with the WSL noting that their family dynamic does not lend itself to trash talk. The interview did emphasise how seriously both Colapintos take the prospect of going head-to-head, with the loss column on the family ledger likely to follow them off-tour as much as on it.
The Round 3 heat is scheduled to roll into the New Zealand Pro draw later in the event window, depending on conditions at Manu Bay. The forecast has a longer-period south-west swell filling in mid-week, which would give both surfers the bigger wall they would prefer.
Whatever the result, the wider Championship Tour benefits. Brother heats are the kind of storyline the WSL traditionally struggles to manufacture, and the Colapintos' willingness to compete properly against each other rather than pull punches has been a quiet selling point of the 2026 men's season. A third heat decides the family bragging rights for now — but with both Colapintos inside the cut, more meetings look certain before the year is out.
