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.
Ffion Davies has just dropped the bombshell that she will not be defending her title at ADCC 2024, as she has decided to compete in the very first Craig Jones Invitational instead. The tournament is the brainchild of elite grappler Craig Jones and it’s been launched as direct competition to the upcoming ADCC world championship, but with significantly more money on the line for athletes. Very few people would ever have predicted that anyone would rival ADCC so naturally when Jones, of all people, announced that he was going to host a tournament with millions of dollars on the line, people were skeptical.
It wasn’t long before the idea became a reality though, and Jones confirmed that his first tournament would be on the same date as ADCC 2024 and even in the same city. Once the world knew that this was going ahead, the best grapplers in the world suddenly had to make what might be one of the most important decisions of their careers. William and Andrew Tackett were the first athletes to withdraw from ADCC 2024 in order to enter CJI instead and while that had a pretty big impact already, ADCC losing a reigning champion to them is a massive blow.
It was inevitable that some competitors were going to make the jump to the Craig Jones Invitational, but very few people would have predicted that the ADCC 2022 under 60kg champion Ffion Davies would be one of them. Jones originally announced that the event would only have two brackets for male competitors and no female division, so nobody even considered that it might effect the women at ADCC. Davies’ announcement is relatively vague but she did specify ‘Opponent to be announced soon’, which seems to imply that she will be doing a single match at CJI instead of a tournament.
Ffion Davies announced the news that she was going to be competing at the Craig Jones Invitational instead of ADCC 2024 in a recent post to her official Instagram account:
