New Zealander Jason Lee lies face down on a Rio de Janeiro floor, his arm twisted in a painful lock. However, the 26-year-old could not be happier — it is exactly what he came halfway around the world to experience.
As pastry chefs might make pilgrimages to France or mystics to India, so hardened fighters from around the globe beat a path to Rio gyms to learn Brazilian jiujitsu, a formerly obscure martial art that has become an unlikely success story and export.
Once restricted almost entirely to the Latin American country, Brazilian jiujitsu is one of the world’s fastest-growing forms of unarmed combat, credited with igniting the mixed martial arts (MMA) cage-fighting phenomenon, and popular from the US to the Middle East and Asia.
Photo: AFP
At the cramped GFTeam academy in a section of northern Rio rarely visited by tourists, Lee is one of four non-Brazilians among the 20 or so men and women grappling on the mats.
Clearly the gringos — as foreigners in Brazil are teasingly dubbed — did not come for the fancy facilities: The gym is open to a noisy sidewalk, has a dodgy toilet, and is so small that fighters literally bounce off the padded walls.
The real attraction is simple: More than half of everyone in the room wears the elite black belt.
“They refer to this place as the champion factory,” Lee says.
A wiry, soft spoken man, Lee was a karate black belt in New Zealand when he stumbled across jiujitsu. Less than three years later — after reaching blue belt, stage two in the long haul to jiujitsu black — he was sufficiently hooked to grab a plane to Rio.
“There’s something about jiujitsu,” Lee said. “You fall under the spell.”
In about 1914, with jiujitsu barely known outside Asia, Japanese immigrant and jiujitsu master Mitsuyo Maeda introduced the sport to Brazil by giving lessons to the sons of businessman Gastao Gracie in the Amazon jungle city of Belem.
However, it was Gracie’s youngest son, Helio — considered too sickly to take part — who would make history.
Helio, according to legend, spent years watching his brothers from the sidelines before finally getting a chance. When he did, he had a novel idea: Why not adapt the traditional moves to suit his weaker physique?
The supposed weakling proved right.
Experimenting and refining, Helio came up with techniques that would allow skilled smaller practitioners to dominate bigger, stronger opponents — and with that, Brazilian jiujitsu was born.
The Gracies have since turned the sport into a remarkable family empire.
Arguably the most successful has been Helio Gracie’s oldest son, Rorion, who launched the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in the US in the 1990s, launching today’s hugely popular, multimillion-dollar MMA industry.
However, the rest of the extended family has been just as busy.
“I have students here from Bermuda, Argentina, Iran, France,” Rolker Gracie, another of Helio’s sons, said in an interview, sitting cross legged on the green and red mats of his jiujitsu school, the Gracie Academy, in Rio de Janeiro.
“I go to Africa for seminars, I go to Buenos Aires for seminars and my brothers go to Israel, Kuwait, everywhere,” Gracie, 51, said. “I have a brother living in Spain, a brother in Honolulu, a brother in San Diego, a brother and two sisters in Los Angeles. And they’re all teaching jiujitsu.”
While the Gracies are jiujitsu royalty, it is an actual royal, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi, who has emerged as the sport’s biggest new booster.
A huge UFC fan, Sheikh Tahnoon created his own Abu Dhabi Combat Club with annual tournaments featuring prize fights worth up to US$40,000, turning the oil-rich emirate into a new capital for the much-traveled martial art.
The United Arab Emirates are also the engine pushing the next wave of expansion, with jiujitsu being included for the first time in 2018 Asia Games in Jakarta and, the UAE hopes, eventually the Olympics.
To Brazilians jiujitsu is the arte suave, or “soft art.” Others liken jiujitsu to physical chess and it is true that with hitting and kicking banned, there are fewer injuries than in other martial arts.
However, given that jiujitsu’s goal is submission through arm locks and choking — competitors often end up briefly unconscious — “soft” is a relative concept.
At the Rio GFTeam academy, headquarters of a network that has spread across Brazil and the US, the air filled with cries and the thwack of limbs against mats. One Brazilian pressed ice to a huge swelling around his eye.
“I’ve broken my nose three times and dislocated both knees,” said Jacob Mackenzie, a multiple champion black belt from Canada.”
However, getting that Brazilian connection is worth the pain.
After training for years in Brazil, Mackenzie, 29, is in high demand as a seminar teacher in a dozen countries.
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