This article is part of our ADCC 2022 coverage. To get live results, play by play, and commentary, we’ll have a live updates article running all weekend.
Things are heating up for the 2022 ADCC World Championships as the first four invites have been handed out, bringing four elite grapplers back to the world’s most prestigious no gi grappling tournament. Out of these invites, only one has gone to a female competitor and this now makes Bianca Basilio the only woman announced for ADCC 2022 so far. This is owing to the fact that the women’s divisions are half the size of the men’s and women can only earn their place in the eventual world championships by winning the second edition of each of the trials events, whereas men can earn their place in both the first and second edition of each.
There has been talk of the promotion expanding it’s women’s divisions recently but there has been no official change to the way things run this time around so it looks as though they will be sticking to two weightclasses with eight competitors in each. Alongside Basilio, Felipe Pena has been announced as one of the invitees in the 99kg weightclass after he was unsuccessful in his bid to dethrone Andre Galvao and take the superfight championship back in 2019. Pena has won a silver medal in the division in both 2015 and 2017, as well as emerging victorious in the absolute division in 2017.
The 88kg division is the only one to have two invites given out at this early stage, the first of which went to the Australian phenom Craig Jones. Jones is well known for winning the silver medal in the division in 2019, and for coming up inches short in his first attempt at glory in 2017, finishing fourth after losing the third-place playoff to the other invitee announced this year, Xande Ribeiro. Ribeiro is a Jiu-Jitsu legend and has earned the status for his virtually unpassable guard, something that has helped earn two ADCC world championships in 2007 and 2009.
Ribeiro had seemingly retired in 2018 and was absent from competition for quite some time before making his return at Fight 2 Win 145 in 2020. Since then he’s competed twice more at BJJ Bet and Fight 2 Win 178 and has vowed to make his return at the 2022 ADCC world championships, something that the promotion has been more than happy to facilitate by giving him one of their invites to the 88kg division. These competitors will each join two men announced for their respective weightclasses, the first of which earned their place in the European, Middle-Eastern, and African trials.
The second men competing in each weightclass earned their spot in the North American East Coast Trials shortly afterward and with less than a year to go, it won’t be long before each division starts to fill up. The promotion announced each of their first four invites to the 2022 ADCC World Championships in separate posts to their official Instagram account:
