Rayssa Leal continues to do what she has been doing for half a decade: turn up at the opening stop of the Street League Skateboarding Championship Tour and win.
The Brazilian skater, who closed the 2025 season with the Super Crown world title, opened 2026 with a victory at SLS Sydney — the first stop on the new Championship Tour. The women's final at Sydney's Aware Super Theatre saw Leal hold off Liz Akama in second and Australian Chloe Covell in third, the latter result giving the home crowd one of its loudest moments of the night.
"Right off her Super Crown win last year, Rayssa Leal kicks off 2026 with another W and proves she is still the one to beat," SLS organisers wrote in the event recap.
Leal's Sydney win was decided in the Best Trick rounds, the back-end of an SLS final where skaters can put up high-difficulty attempts under elimination pressure. Leal's combination of technical clarity and contest temperament has been the defining feature of her career — she has lost individual stops on the SLS tour but rarely been outside the top three at season's end.
Liz Akama, the Japanese teenager whose 2024 Olympic medal at Paris confirmed her arrival, has been Leal's most consistent challenger on the international tour. Akama's second at Sydney is the kind of opening result that, in modern skateboarding contest scoring, leaves the season door wide open. The Super Crown finalist field is decided by season-wide standings across the four-stop tour, with the Super Crown event itself functioning as the world championship.
Chloe Covell's third place was the local story. The Gold Coast teenager has been on the rise for the past three years and now sits inside the elite women's tour conversation in her own right. Covell's run made it onto the SLS broadcast as the home-crowd highlight of the women's final and gave Australian skateboarding fans a podium they could point to as a marker for the rest of 2026.
The women's elite tour is, on the evidence of Sydney, deeper than it has ever been. The top six included athletes from four countries, with Brazilian and Japanese skaters splitting the podium and Australians and Americans pushing into the final round. SLS's investment in women's elite scoring parity — equal prize purses and equal broadcast slots — has been one of the structural drivers of that depth across the past three seasons.
The Championship Tour now moves to Downtown Los Angeles for the second stop, before heading to Paris and the Super Crown world championship at season's end. Leal will be favourite at each stop. Akama, Covell and a chasing pack including American Poe Pinson will look to take her off the top step before she does what she did in 2025 and clean-sweeps a season's worth of finals.
For Leal, the Sydney win is the kind of result that frames a season. Her career narrative has been built on consistency at the moments that matter, and 2026 has begun the way she would have wanted.
