Gordon Ryan was watching Kaynan Duarte at the AIGA Champions League Final 2025 recently and he clearly wasn’t impressed by his performance. Ryan obviously keeps up to date with the latest BJJ events anyway, but he was always going to take a special interest in Duarte. The two men not only have a little history together competitively, but they’re also linked together in the future too. Despite them both being at the very top of the game and in the same generation, they’ve only shared the mats together once. That was all the way back in 2018 at the IBJJF No Gi Pan Championship, where Ryan submitted Duarte with a rear-naked choke.
Although they’re both heavyweights, they’ve generally been in different weight classes either side of 99kg when they’ve competed at ADCC together. Ryan was already an ADCC champion in the under 88kg division when he moved up to under 99kg for 2019, while Duarte made his debut at over 99kg. They both won gold and Ryan also won the absolute, setting up his legendary superfight with Andre Galvao. They both returned in 2022 but Ryan famously didn’t stick to just his superfight, he also entered the over 99kg division for a third weight class title. Ryan won that division at ADCC 2022, while Duarte dropped down to under 99kg and won his second title there.
Ryan didn’t compete in the regular weight classes at ADCC 2024 but Duarte did, winning his third gold medal at under 99kg before moving on to claim his fourth title in a stacked absolute division. Now they each have the same number of weight class and absolute titles at ADCC, and that incredible performance by Duarte has given him the opportunity to challenge Ryan for the superfight title at ADCC 2026. That should be one of the biggest rematches in BJJ history and will be the perfect main event for the show, but Ryan himself has cast doubt on the idea of him competing.
Gordon Ryan continued that trend by declaring that ADCC 2026 is a ‘complete waste of my time’ when talking about Kaynan Duarte at AIGA in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
