Cole Abate has just been promoted to brown belt on the podium of the IBJJF European Championship 2023 after he won a gold medal in the purple belt Lightweight division. He had six matches over the course of the event and managed to submit five of his opponents, putting on a truly amazing display in every match. He met Romulo Rocha in the final of his division, another tough young competitor coming from Alliance Jiu-Jitsu who also really impressed the crowd during his journey to the final. There’s actually been a ton of exciting matches across plenty of different brackets during the IBJJF European Championship already, and the adult black belt divisions haven’t even started at this point.
Abate is the latest brown belt to come from Art of Jiu-Jitsu, and he also represents one of the team’s leading figures in their current generation of elite young competitors. He’s already done more during his professional grappling career than the vast majority of BJJ practitioners can ever hope to achieve, and he’s still got well over a decade left of peak athletic performance. He made his promotional debut at ADCC 2022 despite still being a teenager and gave a genuinely good account of himself in a division stacked with some of the best grapplers on the planet. This only happened because he won his place at the event by fighting his way through a field of hundreds of competitors at ADCC North American East Coast Trials at the age of 16 in 2021.
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, Abate will continue competing at major IBJJF events this year and it’s hard to imagine that there’s many brown belts capable of stopping his rise to the top. With the recent changes to IBJJF belt promotion guidelines, Cole Abate would actually be eligible for promotion to black belt later this year if he’s able to win the IBJJF World Championship at brown belt.
The footage of Cole Abate being promoted to brown belt on the podium after winning the IBJJF European Championship 2023 was shared in a post to the official Instagram account of FloGrappling:
