This article about Gordon Ryan suffering a knee injury and potentially requiring surgery is part of our ADCC 2024 coverage. To get live results, play by play, and commentary, we’ll have a live updates article running all weekend.
Gordon Ryan just revealed that he suffered a knee injury at ADCC 2024, and that it happened early in his superfight with Felipe Pena. It was the long-awaited fourth match between the two rivals and it was booked as an additional superfight for Ryan, taking place at the same event as his traditional ADCC Superfight Championship match against Yuri Simoes. The match against Pena was actually the first one that Ryan took part in, and the injury he suffered in it hampered his performance in the second match too. The superfight with Pena was undoubtedly his toughest out of the two though, as he won by just two points in the end.
Ryan revealed the injury in an interview with FloGrappling right after the Simoes match:
“Yesterday, early in the Felipe (Pena) match, I badly tore my LCL and when I cooled down I could barely even walk. So I went to the hospital at like 1am yesterday, got cortisone shots in that and then did lidocaine before the match. So that LCL, that tore like in the first ten minutes of the Felipe match.”
While any injury is going to hamper an athlete’s performance, Ryan explained exactly how the damage to his knee made his ADCC 2024 superfight with Felipe Pena particularly difficult:
”That’s why when I was trying to extract my leg in those 50/50 positions, the first two or three times I was able to just stand up and pull it out but when I was trying to heist after it got torn he kept putting weight down on my knee and on my hip. So every time I went to heist up he put pressure down on the LCL and I couldn’t pull my leg out. So I was like ‘do I pull it all the way out and completely tear it and then have a worse match tomorrow, or do I give him the time to rest?’ and I gave him the time to rest and it ended up that I wasn’t able to drown him like I thought I was going to be able to.”
He was able to get the job done in the end of course and Ryan improved his personal record against Pena to 2-2, along with getting his fifth win over Simoes the following day. While he’s no doubt busy celebrating those wins, he explained that his first priority after that is addressing that knee injury rather than thinking about any more matches:
“It’s not a 100% tear, but I think it might be torn enough where I need surgery. Who knows, I’ll get back to Austin, rest a little bit and then see what to do.”
Even if no surgery is needed to fix the knee injury, this could mean that ADCC 2024 is the only time that fans get to see Gordon Ryan compete this year. If it does require surgery then a return to competition is unlikely to happen until at around halfway through 2025, depending on how bad the tear actually is. It shouldn’t be too long until Ryan finds out his path to recovery from the injury, and he’ll no doubt share the news with the public.
