By Mike Latronic – There’s a moment in every athlete’s career, if they’re lucky enough, if they hang around long enough, when everything they’ve ground through finally crystallizes into something beautiful. For Leonardo Fioravanti, that moment arrived on June 13th, 2026 at Punta Roca, El Salvador: the 28-year-old Italian became the first surfer from his country to ever win a Championship Tour event. It wasn’t a fluke. He’d been one of the sharpest surfers all week, owning three of the top-five wave scores in the contest, including the only nine-point ride of the event. When the horn sounded, the tears came. Ten years on tour. Ten years of near-misses. And now this.
I first crossed paths with Leo at an ISA Juniors event in Ecuador. He was twelve years old, white-tipped hair, big smile, bigger personality, already sponsored by Quiksilver and surfing better than most kids twice his age. Good surfers from Italy were basically unheard of at that point, so he stood out for all the right reasons in the water. But it was what happened after the contest that told me everything I needed to know about the kid’s future.
I was traveling with Team Hawai’i as a media liaison, and after the event wrapped, a small panic broke out among the Hawai’ian coaches when they realized a few of the younger girls from the team had been testing their curfew. Word was there was a party nearby, so we all piled into the van to go collect them. The music was thumping when we arrived, kids were dancing, and nobody appeared to be in serious trouble; but there in the middle of the dance floor, cool as you like, was this little Italian kid, couldn’t have been more than five foot two, doing the bump and grind with a tall blonde from Uruguay who had at least a foot on him. The audacity. The moxie. I thought to myself, this kid’s going places. Respectfully, Leo is now happily married to his long time girlfriend, a beautiful blonde. Apparently some things you know early.
Standing at the rocks the day Leo won his first CT event was Richard Marsh, one of the most respected coaches in professional surfing and a man who has had more than a little to do with how that twelve-year-old became a world title contender.
I caught up with Marsh during event week, in between tide checks and board sessions and the kind of quiet conversations that never make the highlight reels. He’s an old friend of nearly four decades, a former competitive surfer from Cronulla who made a pretty seamless transition from ripping to coaching. His current CT squad is Connor O’Leary, Tyler Wright, Ramzi Boukhiem, and Leo Fioravanti. Different personalities, different styles, but forged into what Marsh affectionately calls his X-Men and Women.
Getting there wasn’t exactly a straight line. After retiring from competitive surfing earlier than most, Marsh spent a year snowboarding, came back for a satellite tour called the ACC just to surf with his mates, and eventually fell into coaching almost by accident. He worked with Surfing New South Wales, helped a local talent named Kurt Flintoff, and then got pulled into the Red Bull orbit through his longtime friend Andy King, the same Andy King who later coached Gabriel Medina to a world title.
“It was probably 20 odd years ago,” Marsh said with a shrug, the way Australians do when they’re being modest about something significant. “And yeah, from there it just kept going.”
He’s quick to credit Red Bull with changing the entire infrastructure of elite surfing, not just in terms of funding, but in terms of mindset. “The professionalism they brought into the sport just with their budgets made a huge difference,” he said. “We could come up with any crazy idea and if it made sense to them, at the level of Formula One and all these other elite sports, they just got it. It made it high performance instead of management.” It’s a distinction that defines everything Marsh does. It is noteworthy that Leo has been on the Red Bull squad for as long as I can remember.
The work itself is rarely glamorous. Marsh describes the unglamorous core of his craft with something close to reverence: “For every heat in an event, there’s probably been a couple of hundred hours on some beach in some bumfuck zone with no one around, testing boards, brainstorming ideas.” He talks about the small physical adjustments, arm placement, weight distribution, shoulder alignment, that can crack open entirely new possibilities for a surfer. “You just have these little moments where you can fiddle something, open up some shoulders a bit more, and you can have these crazy breakthroughs. And no one sees it, which kind of makes it cool.”
Fioravanti has needed exactly that kind of patient, precise work. The Roman arrived on the Championship Tour with enormous promise but the results didn’t always match the expectation. His best tour finishes before this year were ninths in 2023 and 2025, and there was a brutal near-miss at Pipe last year that stung. But Marsh isn’t a coach who lets his athletes wallow. “I don’t think sugarcoating anything really helps,” he said flatly. He also builds his squad with deliberate care, prioritizing team culture over star power. “I put a lot of value in putting a team together that gels. We have a lot of fun and we’re getting results.”
That trust seems to have been the intangible that finally unlocked something in Leo this season. Heading into El Salvador, he was already ranked third on tour with 11 heat wins and an average heat score of 13.51. He arrived at Punta Roca not as a hopeful, but as a legitimate threat.
Despite a slow start against an in-form Marco Mignot in the quarters, Leo clicked into gear at the back end of the heat and landed that 9.00, the highest wave score of the entire event, to put himself squarely in contention. He dispatched Kanoa Igarashi in the semis, then walked into the final against World No. 1 Italo Ferreira and opened with an 8.33 that put the Brazilian immediately on the back foot. When the horn sounded, it was done. Italy had its first CT win ever.
For Marsh, watching it unfold from the beach carried a particular weight. This is a man who started his coaching career more or less trying to keep young surfers from derailing themselves, and has spent two decades quietly building something far more intentional. “I feel like I’m sharing something that’s taken me my whole life to learn,” he said. “I started surfing when I was eight. I’m nearly 60. That’s what I’ve done. To be able to pass that on to young athletes, it’s pretty cool.”
With his first win banked, Fioravanti now finds himself in the middle of a genuine title race with a long season still ahead. Pipeline, weighted 1.5 times more than other events, looms large, and Leo has had success on the North Shore. The Roman isn’t just flying his country’s flag anymore. He’s in the conversation for the whole thing.
And somewhere in the background, running the numbers, watching the tides, fiddling with the details that nobody ever sees: Richard Marsh is already thinking about the next heat.