This article is part of our Craig Jones Invitational 2024 coverage. To get live results, play by play, and commentary, we’ll have a live updates article running all weekend.
Craig Jones has just announced that his long-awaited intergender match with Gabi Garcia has been officially agreed and will take place at the Craig Jones Invitational on August 16th and 17th, 2024. It’s one of the most bizarre stories to emerge recently and it all began around two years ago, when the pair verbally agreed to a match at a Who’s Number One event. They went back and forth on social media and although it seemed to many fans that it was all a joke between the two competitor, it wasn’t long before it actually started to become a reality. Unfortunately the match was postponed right at the last minute and although they’ve mentioned it in passing, it looked as though it wasn’t meant to be.
Now it seems as though fans will finally get to see one of the most unusual matchups in the history of the sport, as Jones announced during a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience that the contract for it was signed:
“I signed this maybe and hour and a half ago. It might be one of the biggest events in sporting history… The most decorated female athlete of all time, (Gabi Garcia) has put pen to paper to face me at my own event. One hundred percent gonna happen. We signed this contract earlier.”
Although the intergender match against Gabi Garcia was unexpected, Craig Jones has been breaking new ground with the Craig Jones Invitational ever since he first announced the event’s million dollar prize money in each division. His goal with the event is to provide an avenue or professional grapplers to get paid more than they ever have before, and he’s also putting it on the exact same weekend as ADCC 2024 in order to compete with them directly.
This has meant that several competitors have now had to choose which to compete at and although Garcia was originally invited to the over 65kg division at ADCC 2024, it seems as though she might have changed her mind. According to Jones he’s going to be too busy to have a proper training camp for the match against Garcia, but he’s just eager to deliver on something he started so long ago:
“I’ll take her on. I feel good. I probably won’t train for her, I’ll be planning this damn event… I won’t train that hard. I’m happy she is doing it, though. We’ve been talking about this for two and a half years. Feels like an arranged marriage or something.”
Garcia is not an opponent to be taken lightly though, in fact she’s the most successful female competitor in ADCC history. She won’t be an easy opponent for Jones and she might even outweigh him on the night as well, depending on how the next few months go for both of them. With that in mind, this may very well be the last time that fans get to see Jones in action because he previously said that he would retire from competition altogether if he lost to Garcia.
Craig Jones uploaded the clip of him announcing the intergender match with Gabi Garcia in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
