Teenage prodigy Helena Crevar has just taken the next step in her BJJ journey, as she’s been promoted to brown belt in the sport by John Danaher. Crevar is now one of the youngest brown belts in Jiu-Jitsu history, but it’s an incredibly well-deserved and hard-earned promotion. Crevar has been beating black belts for several years at this point and she recently hit the very highest point of her career when she won a silver medal at ADCC 2024. She had to beat two of the best female grapplers in the world in order to stand on that podium, proving that she belongs right at the top of the sport.
She’s just 17 years old and was promoted to purple belt just three months ago, making this also one of the shortest times spent at that belt level. Although that would be far too quick to meet the restrictions that the IBJJF have historically had on time spent at each belt level, Crevar has been able to take advantage of recent changes that the promotion introduced to reward elite competitors. In her final year competing as a juvenile competitor and in her final competition appearance of the year, Crevar won two gold medals at the IBJJF No Gi World Championship and unlocked the ability to progress to the next belt level.
She’ll turn 18 at the beginning of 2025 and now that she’s a brown belt, she’ll have access to a much higher level of competition at IBJJF events. Not that it will be much of a change to Crevar, as she’s an incredibly prolific competitor on the superfight circuit and under ADCC rules as well. It will likely improve her competition opportunities a little bit there as well though, as it’s notoriously difficult for elite young prospects to get tough matches against top competitors. One thing is for certain, Helena Crevar will keep competing as often as she can in 2025 and it wouldn’t be surprising at all to see her on the top of the podium at major IBJJF events at brown belt.
Helena Crevar announced the news that she had been promoted to brown belt in BJJ by John Danaher in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
