Madej, Levin and Lette won in Barão.
The 8th edition of October Sun took place last weekend in Barão de São João in the Algarve.
The tournament which is usually scheduled for the first weekend of October took place this year on the second weekend. It was a risky bet as rain start to show up at that time after 6 months of absence.
Weather forecast announced 50+ mm of rain over the weekend and a few teams and players droped last minute.
The tournament started on Friday with a total of 22 teams, 12 teams were playing in the moring and 10 in the afternoon.
Rain showed up a few times but didn’t stop us playing. Thanks to the lights we could play till late and everyone end up playing 4 games.
On Friday teams were mixed into 2 groups and 4 rounds were played. At the end of the day the teams Spectrum and Latina Thunder remained both undefeated after playing each 8 games in total but never played against each other yet.
Once the games stopped everybody could enjoy delicious pizzas before going to the afterparty in the forest.
After little sleep for some of the players the double elimination started on sunday morning.
The vibe was nice, games were good to watch and everyone was shooting for their favourite teams all day.
Once we got closer to the end games started to get pretty intense and teams got eliminated once after the other.
Suntingz composed from local and ex local players (Ollie, Ben, Mauritz) finished 5th after being putting out by Green Team.
On the same ranking we had Summertime (Matt, Miles, Saul) that got defeated by Latina Thunder.
Latina Thunder (Tony, Patricky, Johnny) finished 4th on sunday after their lost against Green Team
On the winner bracket final Spectrum composed of Madej, Levin, and Lette played against Delta composed of Mya and two local players Mass and Gael.
After a few minutes Levin shot on Mass foot but the game continued and Mass scored on Lette a few seconds later. The goal ref who had seen that Levins shot was going into the goal helped the ref on the decision who accepted the goal. 1-0 Spectrum
Game was back on and even if Delta was pushing hard trying to go back on the score it wasn’t enough against the trio Madej, Levin and Lette who demonstrated some high quality polo. Spectrum won 4-0 at the end.
On the looser bracket final Delta played against Green Team.
Delta took the lead twice but Green Team game back again at 2-2. A few seconds before the end of the regular time Baptiste scored a nice smart shot between the goalies wheels.
Delta finished 3rd, which made Gael really happy for his first polo tournament.
In the final Spectrum played against Green Team. After a quick 1:0 lead the team around last years winner Lette continued to play well and won 2:0 in the end.
At the end of the tournament Orlando took the mic to annonce the winners. The three first teams were called and all of them won a bottle of medronho from the village.
Then the players got to choose who improved the most over the weekend. Everybody without a doubt screamed Marias name. The 13 year old player played amazingly all weekend and scored most of the goals for his team.
Legendary Lette said the following after he won the tournament back to back: „barao barao. a small village in the pampas. many people come to surf in the algarve. we came to play polo. It’s a tournament with many surprises in barao de sao joao. out of reality! the community is very well organized. intense games were played over three days until late into the night.“
Sunday was streamed by DownOver on YouTube. Go watch (;
Thanks a lot to Mass for helping out with the article!
Winners History:
2024: Madej, Lette, Levin
2023 : Damien, Lette, Jeff
2022 : Olif, Clement, Mass
2019: Andy, Alix, Pablo
2018 Nelle, Greg, Max
2017 : Brice, Tijs, Bulle, Mass
2016 : Brice, Tijs, Mass