Craig Jones recently broke down each division at the ADCC European, Middle-Eastern, and African Trials 2023 and put a lot of attention on the 77kg weight class, where his teammate Jozef Chen emerged victorious. Winning ADCC Trials is always a phenomenal achievement and for many competitors it may well be the highlight of their career, but Chen’s division was even tougher than most ADCC Trials divisions are. Jones was clearly aware of this himself and he didn’t even assign full credit for Chen’s remarkable achievement to B-Team Jiu-Jitsu:
“77, most stacked division of the entire tournament. Without question, this had the biggest names in the event and it was taken out by none other than B-Team athlete Jozef Chen. Of course we can’t claim too much credit for him, he’s like a self-made athlete, he’s trained all over the world. He spent some time with Jason Rau so we’ve gotta credit Jason Rau’s contribution to his camp as well and he’s not been training an awfully long time. He’s only 19 years old and he’s only a brown belt.”
The 77kg division was always going to be tough with some of the names competing, but Chen’s path to the final was particularly hard. In fact, there’s been more than a few questions surrounding the bracketing of the 77kg division at the ADCC European, Middle-Eastern, and African Trials 2023. Jones has been the source of some of those questions himself, but he started out by clarifying who isn’t responsible for the bracketing:
“Mo Jassim, head of ADCC, he runs some of the Trials. He runs some of the American Trials, he does not run the European Trials. I’m putting this in here because I’m gonna complain about some stuff and I don’t want you to think I’m complaining directly about Mo Jassim. Mo puts on a great Trials events.”
The main complaints about the bracketing of the 77kg division lie with the fact that the majority of the top competitors in the division were all placed on one side of the bracket. Not only that, but it seemed as though the classic ADCC rule of putting teammates against one another early in the division’s progress wasn’t followed either. This meant that there was a clear contrast between what Jozef Chen and Oliver Taza had to do in order to make it to the final of ADCC Trials and Craig Jones illustrated it perfectly:
“Thankfully Jozef persevered and still won but Oliver Taza, his side of the bracket basically had no names on that side and on the other side was: Mateusz Szczecinski, probably one of the scariest grapplers in the world with the amount of people’s legs he breaks. Tommy Langaker, world-renowned in both the gi and no gi, and it also had Davis Asare who was actually Oliver Taza’s teammate… He was meant to be on Taza’s side of the bracket, they do this of course so that you wouldn’t have an all New Wave final there, which would be pretty bad… That’s when things happen where there might be a fake match or something, they typically make them face off earlier. Davis made weight and then apparently was sick on the day so yeah, super strange.”
“So for Jozef to win this he had to beat, in a row, Mateusz Szczecinski, who at the previous European Trials broke his foot pretty badly, then he had to immediately face Tommy Langaker, and then in the final face off against Oliver Taza. Oliver Taza is a standout grappler, he’s been around forever. He’s competed in just about every event, he’s been dominating the Opens. He’s had so much practice in this ruleset and he had… I’m not gonna say it was an easy run to the finals, none of these guys are gonna be easy to beat athletes… But if you contrast Jozef’s run and Taza’s run, Taza’s run was significantly easier so I was worried about Jozef going in. He had competed in Quintet the week before, and he had a crazy run to be able to win this.”
Craig Jones gave a detailed breakdown of every division at the ADCC European, Middle-Eastern, and African Trials 2023, including his teammate Jozef Chen winning the under 77kg division, in a recent video uploaded to the official YouTube channel of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu:
