Fioravanti Finally: Italy Gets Its First CT Win at Punta Roca as Moore Goes Back-to-Back

Leonardo Fioravanti stood at Punta Roca on Sunday and waited three years for this. The Italian has surfed seven CT seasons. He has been in finals before. He has posted tens that looked like wins before. The win itself kept not arriving — until June 15, when he rode a Punta Roca right to a 15.33 total against Italo Ferreira and became the first Italian in history to win a Championship Tour event.

Ferreira, the men's CT rankings leader, posted a 10.90. It was not enough.

The Men's Final

The men's final ran in the afternoon on Punta Roca's mechanical rights. La Libertad's offshore northwesterly had been running clean since morning, the incoming tide filling in the point's characteristic walls — steep-faced, long, with the kind of hollow mid-sections that reward surfers who can read the break's unpredictable acceleration.

Fioravanti opened with an 8.33 on his first wave and never ceded the lead. He found a second scoring ride that pushed his combined total to 15.33. Ferreira, competing in what would have been his home territory of high-performance rail surfing, could not match the Italian's first-wave score and finished the final at 10.90.

The margin was decisive. For Fioravanti, it was the biggest win of his career. For Italy, it was the CT's first-ever result in the country's favour. The jump moved him six places up the ratings to World No. 3 — a striking shift in a single heat.

For Ferreira, the defeat meant a second successive CT final appearance and a trip home to Brazil without the win his season had been building toward. He still holds the men's yellow jersey. The tour heads to Saquarema for the VIVO Rio Pro — his home break, where the crowd will be wearing his colours.

The Women's Final

Carissa Moore made her back-to-back wins look routine, which is the most impressive part of it.

The Hawaiian had already won the event immediately before El Salvador. When she beat Tyler Wright in the women's final at Punta Roca — 15.10 to 13.84 in a heat that came down to the final five minutes — she extended a win streak that has moved her from further down the rankings to World No. 2 behind CT leader Gabriela Bryan.

Wright was the tougher opponent. Australia's most decorated active surfer on the CT pushed Moore through the final exchanges, and the 13.84 scoreline reflects a genuine contest rather than a routine victory. Moore's final wave was the difference — a committed, high-line ride along Punta Roca's wall that she converted with the kind of efficiency that reads, on paper, as inevitable.

It isn't inevitable. Back-to-back CT wins on the Championship Tour require winning four to six heats across two different events, in different surf, against a different draw each time. Moore is doing it while the rest of the women's field is treating each win as extraordinary. She appears to be treating them as expected.

Punta Roca delivered competition-grade surf throughout the finals day — an incoming swell from the southwest producing the point's characteristic long-period walls. The volcanic reef that defines the break's bathymetry was working as intended: a fast entry, a steep mid-section, and a barrelling close-out toward the beach that separates athletes who know the wave from those who are still learning it.

El Salvador's coastline has been a CT stop long enough that the field knows this break. The high-scorers on finals day were the surfers who committed to the critical sections — not the ones riding out the wide walls looking for safe scores.

What It Means

The results from Sunday reshape the season's middle section.

Ferreira goes to Rio with the men's lead intact but with Fioravanti now closer than almost anyone expected. A win for Fioravanti at Saquarema — where Brazil's crowd would be the loudest and Ferreira's support the deepest — would make the title conversation genuinely open.

Moore's move to No. 2 puts her in direct contact with Bryan's lead. Whether the streak extends in Brazil is the question that carries through to the next event window.

For Fioravanti: thirty-one years old, seven seasons, and now a CT champion. Italy's surfing community has had the result it's been waiting for. Punta Roca got to deliver it.

For the route guide to surfing the same wave, see our Punta Roca destination guide.