Gordon Ryan has wasted no time in making his thoughts known after the conclusion of the heated debate around the rules used at CJI 2, and he’s got plenty of criticism on behalf of his New Wave Jiu-Jitsu teammates. It’s been a pretty chaotic week for the grappling world and it all stems from the final match of the tournament, where nobody from either New Wave or B-Team Jiu-Jitsu could get a submission and they went to the judges’ scorecards. All three judges agreed that the five rounds tallied up to a 47-47 draw, but it was what happened next that caused controversy.
B-Team were announced as the winners because of the tiebreaker criteria, where the victory would go to whatever team won the final round. Ryan had already accused CJI of being biased against his teammates before the event had even finished, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise that he took issue with the decision. He spoke up on social media almost immediately after CJI ended, claiming that this tiebreaker criteria was not in the athletes’ contracts. Instead, he argued that the victory was supposed to go to the team that won the most individual matches; which would have been New Wave.
Originally the anonymous investor behind CJI apparently agreed with him, as he pledged to pay New Wave the million dollars they would have won regardless. That didn’t put the issue to rest for Ryan though, as he began demanding that the decision was reversed in favor of New Wave as well. Not only did that fall on deaf ears but just a few days later, the investor actually changed his mind and revealed that he would not be paying out to New Wave after all. He explained his reasoning in great detail, but he now believes that the original decision should stand and B-Team are the rightful winners.
This is because the rules were apparently clarified to all 8 coaches who had teams competing at the event and he was shown footage of these rules meetings. This is actually something that Damien Anderson had already explained to the public, even going so far as to share a clip of one of them where the relevant rule is discussed. Ryan has also complained about both the way that the bracket was drawn and the way that some of the individual matches were judged, but both of those issues have already been addressed by Craig Jones and CJI 2 judge Miha Perhavec.
Gordon Ryan laid out his full criticism of CJI 2 in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
