Brianna Ste-Marie has been one of the fastest growing stars in female BJJ over the last year or so and she’s recently overcome one of her biggest challenges to date; a submission-only match that took almost three hours to finish. This might shock some fans, but these kinds of matches are actually a trip back to the old-school origins of BJJ. What we generally refer to as “submission-only” today, actually isn’t submission-only at all. In the vast majority of cases, what we really mean is that the event doesn’t follow the traditional IBJJF or ADCC point-scoring formats.
Most of these events instead turn to judges to determine the winner once a predetermined time-limit has been reached, or they might use EBI rules and use the overtime win-condition instead. It’s easy to see why as well, because most of these events are televised or performed in front of a live crowd and some kind of schedule does need to be stuck to. Instead, the truest and original form of submission-only grappling is exactly that, two athletes step on the mat and continue to fight until one of them secures a submission and forces the tap, no matter how long that takes.
That’s exactly the kind of submission-only battle that rising star Brianna Ste-Marie won at Washington Submission Series, it just took a little over two hours and forty-five minutes for her to finish Hannah Sharp in the end. This was a unique challenge for Ste-Marie, the female competitor that we picked as our breakout grappler of the year for 2021. It’s just another feather in her cap though, as she not only won the very first Medusa Combat Jiu-Jitsu tournament in emphatic style, but she also finished the year as the ADCC North American East Coast trials champion at under 60kg.
Brianna Ste-Marie announced that she had won her phenomenal submission-only match in a little under three hours in a post to her official Instagram account:
