The anonymous investor who made CJI 2 happen has now changed his mind and the New Wave Jiu-Jitsu competitors will not be receiving a million dollars. It’s surely going to be a huge blow to the 5 men involved, as they will all lose out on $200,000 that they thought was coming to them. They didn’t actually win the event of course, as B-Team Jiu-Jitsu were declared the winners during the live broadcast. It was an incredibly close final match and after all five matches, all three judges had the teams tied at 47-47. That meant that the winning team was decided by the winner of the final round, so Nicky Rodriguez had brought victory home to B-Team.
There was immediate confusion in the arena and the New Wave competitors seemed visibly upset by the outcome, and not just because they lost the match. Instead it was because they actually disagreed with the ruling, with their teammate Gordon Ryan publicly complaining about CJI being biased against them. The complaints went from the arena and on to social media, as many fans were also siding with the losing team. The controversy only got worse when the official rules were dug up and there was a contradiction between two points; with one indicating that New Wave would win due to winning the most individual matches and the other describing the tiebreaker ruling that was used during the broadcast.
That apparent contradiction led to the anonymous investor for CJI 2 declaring that he thought New Wave should be the rightful winners, and pledging to pay them the million dollars they would have won. This would obviously have gone a long way toward settling the disagreement, but it also left the event with a pretty unsatisfactory conclusion. It also wasn’t even enough for some people, as Gordon Ryan then began demanding that they also declare New Wave the official winners too. More information started to emerge in the days that followed though, and it painted a much different picture of the apparent controversy.
B-Team coach Damien Anderson shared footage of a rules meeting that the coaches attended and it showed clearly that one of the CJI judges, Miha Perhavec, actually explained how the tiebreaker that was used during the broadcast works and when it comes into effect. Perhavec and Jones also later broke down the judging for the event to explain how they reached the 47-47 scorecards, leading to the tiebreaker. Now it seems as though the CJI 2 investor has come to the same conclusion as the promotion itself, and he announced in a Reddit post that New Wave aren’t going to receive a million dollars:
