European Wakesurf Cup 2026three days told by the numbers

The organisers could not have ordered it better. Not a drop of rain in three days, and gusts that peaked at just over 20 km/h on Saturday afternoon. Friday opened under low cloud that burned off after lunch; Sunday, finals day, was the sunniest and warmest of the three. Whatever happened on the water this weekend, the weather was not the story.

Fourteen titles went to six nations. Ukraine took four and Switzerland three, while the hosts collected more podiums than anyone: eleven for Italy. Abygaelle Perren was the only double winner of the weekend, in Grom Girls skim and in Under 18 Women surf. Qualifying settled surprisingly little: only six of the fourteen winners had topped their category on the first two days, and Andy Schmahl took the Masters Men surf title from fifth place in qualifying. Two riders reached the podium the long way, through the last-chance heat: Benedetta Maria Cereda, second in Under 18 Women surf, and Michael Steinlesberger, third in Masters Men skim.

The ride of the weekend did not come on finals day. It came on Saturday morning, in a qualifying heat, when Antonyna Mikhnevych, a Ukrainian under-18 skimmer, posted 78.75 in a heat whose median sat at 34.17: a gap of 44.59 points that nobody else came close to. Four of the eight best performances were ridden outside the finals, in qualifying and in a last-chance heat, and three of them came from riders under 18. Seven rides reached Band IV, the top tier.

Skim was the higher-scoring board all weekend, averaging 49.1 against 42.3 on the surf side. The top mark of the event, a 90.00, landed in Friday's Open Men skim qualifying. Right behind it came the surprise of the European Cup: an 86.25 in Saturday's Grom Girls qualifying, the under-14 category, the second-highest score awarded across 182 scored performances.

The four boxes are scored separately, but at the European Cup they moved as one. In 71 of the 182 scored performances the panel gave the same mark on all four, and across the event the four columns tracked each other almost perfectly. When a run was good, it was good everywhere. Where the judges did split their marks, Difficulty edged ahead, by less than a tenth of a point.

Skim owns this list with eight of the ten rides, and two riders appear twice. Raw score is not the whole story: the 90.00 of the weekend, the highest mark awarded at the European Cup, ranks only seventh here, because the rest of its heat was strong too. Half of these rides came in finals, the other half in qualifying and last-chance heats.

The finals were a harder day at the office. Average scores fell from 48.6 in qualifying to 43.8 in the finals, down in 11 of 14 categories, yet the spread inside the heats barely moved: 12.0 points from the median in qualifying, 11.7 in the finals. The whole field stepped down together. The tightest fight of the European Cup came on Saturday, in the Masters Men surf last-chance heat, with three riders inside 4.7 points; the Amateur Women final ran it close, with three riders inside 5.0.