Costa Rican surfer Rachel Agüero Cabezas won the women’s shortboard title at the Central American and Caribbean Games in the Dominican Republic tpday, delivering Costa Rica its first gold medal in surfing in the history of the regional competition.
The 20-year-old beat Barbados’ Chelsea Tuach 10.50 points to 7.33 in the final at Playa Encuentro in Cabarete, on the northern coast of Puerto Plata province. Agüero’s score came from two waves graded 5.83 and 4.67, while Tuach posted a 5.00 and a 2.33. According to the National Olympic Committee, Agüero took control of the heat from the opening minutes and never surrendered the lead. Tuach needed a wave scored at 5.51 or better to overturn the result and never found one.
Agüero reached the final by eliminating the surfer most observers had installed as the favorite. In the fourth round she defeated Nicaragua’s Candelaria Resano, an Olympian and world championship medalist, by 12.57 points to 11.33. She had opened the competition on the first day of the event with 11.16 points, built on waves of 7.33 and 3.83, to win her heat ahead of Puerto Rico’s Havanna Cabrero and Colombia’s Margarita Conde. That 7.33 stood as the highest-scoring women’s wave of the opening day.
The result caps a season that has established Agüero as the leading woman in Costa Rican competitive surfing. She arrived in the Dominican Republic as the two-time national Open champion, having sealed her second consecutive title only weeks earlier at the closing round of the Banco LAFISE national circuit at Playa Hermosa de Jacó, the beach where she lives and trains.
In March she won the Denga Santa Teresa Pro at Playa Carmen. She has also been competing on World Surf League regional events, the tier where surfers accumulate the results and ranking points that open the door to the sport’s professional circuits. Costa Rica had never won a surfing gold medal at these Games before Wednesday. The country’s only previous podium finishes in the sport came at San Salvador 2023, when Lía Díaz and Anthony Flores each took bronze in longboard.
Sam Reidy added another on Tuesday, beating the Dominican Republic’s Gian Marco Oliva 14.50 to 11.60 in the men’s shortboard bronze heat, a result the Costa Rican Surf Federation described as the first shortboard medal at the Games. Flores finished fourth in the men’s longboard event this year after losing his bronze heat to Mexico’s Heriberto Torres.
The surfing competition ran from July 25 until today at Playa Encuentro, a break that has become one of the Caribbean’s most reliable competitive venues, and drew 71 surfers from 12 countries across shortboard, longboard and stand-up paddle surf. Agüero’s medal was Costa Rica’s third gold of Santo Domingo 2026. The first two came in taekwondo, through Jaycee Bassett and Neshy Lindo.
This edition of the Games is the 25th and marks a century since the first was held in Mexico City in 1926. Organizers programmed 40 sports, more than the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic schedule, and more than 6,200 athletes from 37 countries and territories are competing over 16 days.
Costa Rican surfing has been producing this kind of result with increasing regularity. Díaz became the first surfer from Costa Rica or anywhere in Central America to qualify for the World Surf League’s Longboard Tour, a circuit that opened its season at Huntington Beach in California this month.
Leilani McGonagle won a place on the 2026-27 Challenger Series, the qualifying tier immediately below the elite Championship Tour. Bodyboarder Dulce Agüero reached a podium at Pipeline in Hawaii in March. The national federation has said its planning is now oriented around the qualifying events for the 2028 Olympics, where surfing will again be on the program.
For Agüero, the initial reward is a regional title at 20 and a clear line of sight to the next stage. The Pan American Games in Lima in 2027 come first, and the Olympic qualifying calendar follows behind it.
