Sports Reporter
Morocco’s Teva Bouchgua and Lilias Tebbai denied South Africa a home victory at the Royal St Andrews Hotel Rip Curl Cup on Easter Monday, winning the men’s and women’s titles at East Beach in Port Alfred, where South African surfers were among those chasing places on the 2026 Challenger Series.
The Port Alfred contest was the final stop of the 2025/26 World Surf League Africa regional qualifying season and carried QS 4,000 status for the men and QS 2,000 for the women.
The top four men and top two women after the event will advance to the Challenger Series, making the Easter weekend showdown one of the most important events on the African regional calendar.
South Africa went into the weekend with a strong hand.
Adin Masencamp and Sarah Baum started the event as the Africa rankings leaders, while Connor Slijpen and Daniel Emslie were among the men still in the hunt and Jessie van Niekerk, Louise Lepront, Natasha van Greunen and Anastasia Venter were chasing the remaining women’s qualification place behind Baum.
But the titles slipped away from the home contingent on finals day.
Official WSL Qualifying Series posts confirmed Bouchgua and Tebbai as the event winners, while contemporaneous reports said Bouchgua beat South Africa’s Connor Slijpen in the men’s final and Tebbai defeated South Africa’s Zoë Steyn in the women’s decider.
The event unfolded in demanding conditions. The official festival preview had pointed to a solid forecast for East Beach, and festival updates on Monday said the second day of competition opened in huge surf, with some of the bigger sets closing out across the river.
The Rip Curl Cup has grown into one of the headline attractions of the Port Alfred Easter Festival.
This year’s programme ran from 3 to 6 April, with the elite QS event following the junior Rip Curl GromSearch and serving as the season finale for the WSL Africa regional qualifying series.
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