Skateboarders Rayssa Leal And Gustavo Ribeiro Win Their First SLS Super Crown World Championships

The 2022 SLS Championship Tour ended with the world championship stop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Sunday, and the two new Super Crown champions don their respective titles for the first time ever.

For the women, hometown hero Rayssa Leal from Imperatriz, Brazil remained perfect on the season with her world championship–clinching performance after winning all three stops of the SLS Tour on the road to Rio—at Jacksonville, Florida, in July; Seattle, Washington, in August; and Las Vegas, Nevada, in October.

It appeared as though Leal wouldn’t have much trouble securing the win in Rio after she set the highest line score (6.7) of the final on her first run. In the trick section, however, Japan’s Funa Nakayama threw down the gauntlet with the highest-scoring trick of the day, a gap out front crook for a 7.8.

But Leal took over first place again with a gap out back smith that scored a 7.4, and Nakayama couldn’t catch her with her gap front noseblunt that scored 6.9. Leal finished with a total score of 21.1.

Though she’s only 14, it wouldn’t be accurate to call Leal a “rising star” in street skating or the “future face of the sport.” She’s one of the most dominant women in the discipline, having just recently taken silver in street skateboarding’s Olympic debut in Tokyo and winning at X Games Chiba.

But a Street League Skateboarding world championship was one of the few accolades she hadn’t checked off her list yet, and it was one that meant a lot to her. In 2018, when she was 10, she messaged the owner of the league to ask if she could participate.

“Since I was a little girl, I always watched Street League and the girls who skated always inspired me a lot,” said Leal on Sunday after her win. “Today I’m here, being the world champion for the SLS and I’m very happy to be able to be part of all that they are providing me.”

On the men’s side, it was Portugal’s Gustavo Ribeiro who was also earning his first coveted SLS Super Crown title. Ribeiro, 21, came in third in Jacksonville and seventh in Seattle, but won the Vegas stop to set up his world championship showing.

After setting a plus-9.0 score on his best line, Ribeiro and the United States’ Braden Hoban and Chris Joslin jostled for position during the trick portion of the final, and all six of the top skaters finished within a three-point range.

But in the end, Ribeiro’s 9.3-point best run and 9.3-point best trick won the day, with a final score of 27.9.

Though Ribeiro hails from Portugal, he rides for Team Cariuma, a sustainable sneaker brand out of Brazil, and counts many fans there. Cariuma has as of late been challenging the dominance that shoe sponsors Nike, Vans and adidas have held over skateboarding.

Leal and Ribeiro were also the winners of last year’s Salt Lake City stop of the SLS Tour, where the new format the league uses debuted. It sees each skater in the men’s and women’s field getting one 45-second run in the “line” section and four best trick attempts. Each rider, men’s and women’s, had one 45-second run in section one, or the “line” section, followed by four best trick attempts. (In Sunday’s world championships, there were two runs in the line section.)

After dropping the lowest and the highest scores, the top four riders move on to a “super final” in which each gets two additional best trick attempts to replace their lowest recorded scores, for a total possible score of 30.

In 2021, Brazil’s Pamela Rosa and the United States’ Jagger Eaton emerged as Super Crown champions.

““Ever since I was little, I dreamed of competing in an event like this. At 21 I managed to arrive and be the world champion,” Ribeiro said. “I never thought it would be this fast, but it goes to show that nothing is impossible.”