With just one regular season event remaining ahead of the Finals, Filipe Toledo is very much on course to retain his World SURF League title.

The Brazilian has won three of the nine events contested so far, and barring disaster at the last fixture on the schedule in Tahiti on August 20-30 he will head to the Final Five top of the standings.

The 28-year-old’s season has been a near mirror image of that of 2022, when he topped the leaderboard before downing countryman Ítalo Ferreira in the Finals.

Will history repeat itself for Toledo in September?

Leading the Way

As long as Toledo makes it through SHISEIDO Tahiti Pro, the tenth and final event of the season, injury free, he will head to the WSL Finals on the Orange Coast of California with a second World Surf League title within his grasp.

Those betting on the World Surf League can clearly see the advantage that Toledo has over his nearest rivals, the likes of all-time great Gabriel Medina and the dangerous outsiders with the sportsbooks such as John John Florence.

Toledo is the 4/7 favorite, which in the American format is -175 and in decimal 1.57 when using an odds converter. The nearest challenger to the Brazilian is priced at 3/1 (+300 or 4.00), while even the likes of 11/1 Medina (+1100 or 12.00) and 17/1 Florence (+1700 or 18.00) are considered nothing more than possible champions rather than probable.

Successive Celebrations

You have to go back to 2017 for the last time a male WSL competitor successfully defended their title – Florence going back-to-back with a narrow victory over Medina, who won events nine and ten to crank up the pressure on the Hawaiian.

Of course, anyone that picks up a board has the ambition of emulating Kelly Slater, who has won 56 events on the WSL tour amongst a stack of other accolades.

Slater has won the World Surf League a record eleven times, including five consecutive triumphs from 1994 and 1998, to confirm his status as the king of the waves. He's still going strong in the WSL at the age of 51, which reveals how far Toledo has to go to be considered one of the all-time greats.

Before later, the most dominant force in competitive surfing was Mark Richards. Although the WSL was still in its relative infancy when he was a pioneer of the waves, the Australian was still able to pick up five world titles – including four in a row between 1979 and 1982, where he was pushed hard by the first female professional surfer, Margo Oberg.

Four men have won a trio of WSL titles, including Slater’s boyhood hero Tom Curren, Andy Irons, Mick Fanning and Medina, who will still have the aspiration to add a fourth championship to his collection.

For now, Toledo is the most likely to join the hall of fame, and the fact that the Final Five will take place in San Clemente in 2023 – the coastal city he uprooted to from Sao Paulo nearly a decade ago – ensures the Brazilian will enjoy home advantage.

Will he be able to make it count?