The prestigious Master50+ in Palma de Mallorca, a competition within the Semana Master competition, ended with an extraordinary victory for Team Italia Sud. The team, composed of Nicola Riolo and Raffaele Loprete, showed tenacity and talent in a competition full of twists and turns. The race was not without its difficulties, but the two Italian athletes were able to maintain concentration and make the most of every opportunity. A path of sacrifice, mental endurance and determination that saw them impose themselves with over 30 valid catches, an extraordinary score and impeccable teamwork.

Hearing Riolo, just “stepped off” the podium, we could not help but greet him without the classic “the Wolf loses its fur …“.

After the well-deserved congratulations, we wrung a promise from him: a narrative, from the gut; a narrative of this Master50+, as Riolo sees it, with the competitive spirit running, still boiling, through his veins.

Riolo and Loprete at the start of the Master50+.


An uphill start

“Firm start on 2 big white groupers…gone, vanished overnight. Morale already wavering but still focused. We were seeing the real possibility of the 60,000-point haul we had set as our goal fade away. But we had two more white groupers to check. Less easy to catch but then who knows?” said Nicola.

The race turned out to be a real battle against the adverse conditions and the unpredictability of the race course.
“More displacement on two conger eels and 2 equally deep redfish…the conger eels will both get stuck and of redfish only the 9-ounce one…the one over 2kg is gone, damn it! It is 1 hour into the race when the snakes and redfish are on board. Now we have to close the 7 brown meagres to take the bonus and cheer up. Unfortunately, in the next 5 moves, our brown meagres are gone..gone!” recounted the winner.

“Everything seems to be uphill. Next we decide to make the following dives to another bottom spot with some bream and 1 brown meagre over 2kg… Deserted too! There is a strange current that has brought murky water to the bottom and the fish seem to have migrated who knows where. In one last dive, Raffaele still manages to hit a nice seabream.”
Despite the initial difficulties, Nicola and Raffaele never lost their determination.
“We still have to stay focused. Yes, it has already been 2 hours of the race but we are confident that we still have another two-thirds of the race to go. We stay calm and decide to try on another white grouper on the passage. One dive…another and another to be sure that this one is also not in the house…,” the athlete explained.

Riolo medaled Master50+

“We change strategy in a hurry…too few fish on board. We run ashore to a shallow area where we saw a few fish under a lost sheet in a few feet of water. A seabream and a cherry wrasse put on board in a dive and immediately a move back to the start to try to catch some mullet. Immediately we catch two but realize that with the calm sea and extremely clear water on land, it will be a feat to get them within range.
Surprisingly we manage to catch 10 in half an hour…all big ones, good!”

The turning point of the race

The turning point came in the final moments of the race, when the team’s experience and preparation made the difference.
“I take a little bit of confidence and tell the team that I feel ready to take the plunge on the last white available to us. It is the smallest of the 4 and it is also the hardest and the deepest but I am fine and I feel ready.
Raffaele watches over my dive and I start toward the bottom with the plummet in my hand. I see her bob nervously and make a big fuss at the entrance. I was hoping to catch her in the fall but nothing. I place the lead on the muddy bottom and stop waiting straight in front of the den entrance. Just a big fuss but I’m fine and wait. Suddenly I begin to glimpse the dark silhouette of the head slowly approaching toward the den entrance.
Now! I pull the trigger. It’s caught in the head but I can see it’s not caught well and it’s wiggling like crazy. I have to grab it or it will rip. I succeed almost immediately by putting my left hand between the gills and begin the ascent.
I’m doing great and the adrenaline from the turn the race is starting to take is supporting me just fine.
Raphael on the surface understands everything and is already ready with his pocket knife in hand.

He promptly intervenes and the fish is passed to Massimo and Gioacchino on board and we are off again. Morale is now high. We didn’t find the previous days’ cernions, the second conger eel in weight, our croakers and the giant scorpionfish but we are still optimistic for the continuation of the race. We make another shift ashore to avoid catching the libeccio in our faces, which meanwhile has become tense and has raised a complicated wave for the bow swell we should follow for the following shifts.

Loads at Master50+

In little water we still catch in one dive a viable salpa and a redfish underweight by a little. Now the fun begins. We are at the end of the race, barely an hour to go, but we have in sequence a series of moves in which we are very confident. We will find out at the end that all the other teams have already passed through the area. Raphael and Joachim are charged and confident. Maximus has memorized the shifts we will swim in the last 40 minutes of the race. I am a beast. I know that now I have to pull out the attributes and do everything perfectly. No margin for error for us. Every fish caught or lost can make a difference in the challenge for victory. We get off to a good start right away. Seabream and wrasse in quick succession. The pace is impressive. We are in 50 feet of water and hardly breeze before the next dive.

In the 40 minutes we have left ‘to defat,’ we will catch a beauty of 12 more wrasses and 4 more seabream.”

Team Italia Sub's hauls at Master50+
Team’s amazing cable at weigh-in

A well-deserved title and a personal triumph at the Master50+

In the end, Nicola’s team finished the competition with an impressive haul despite the difficult conditions. “Mamma mia what a race! We realized we had a good performance. We were missing grouper, conger eel, redfish, and brown meagres, which, as realistically planned, would have put us comfortably over the 60,000-point goal I had confided to my close friends the night before. A great test nonetheless.”

The “without-filters-ever” Riolo adds, “My final thoughts are pretty simple. We did a Mr. World Championship in our category. With only two days of preparation we achieved the same score with which at the Master and Master Open took the third step of the podium and we risked bringing to the weight so many more fish.
Personally, I am proud of my performance and of the very strong and cohesive group in every department. I know perfectly well that I possess a gift, an innate talent perhaps. I know full well that I have neglected it over time because of the many disappointments that have scarred me deeply and the time that passes and inevitably replaces our priorities. But I know just as clearly that I went and got one of the many world championships that were denied me when I was not the real Riolo.”

The full Italia Sud team

With this victory, Nicola Riolo writes his name in the history of the Master 50+, proving that passion and determination know no age. “Not with the Italian Federation but with the Balearic Federation. Not with the national team but with ‘my’ fantastic team. Not when I was a war machine but now…. Now, yes, only now, at 62 years old. With all my aches and pains, my problems and with a part of me saying, ‘but do you still need to figure out who you are?’
I went for it, that world championship, because I was always convinced that I was entitled to it!”

A timeless champion, a legendary feat.

Nicola Riolo with champion José Amengual