Kade Ruotolo was recently asked about the prevalence of PEDs in BJJ and he was very clear about where he stands on the topic. It’s been a longstanding issue in the sport, as the IBJJF is the only grappling promotion that tests athletes and even then only a handful of competitors are actually subject to it. Although PEDs has always been rife in BJJ, it seems to be hitting a whole new level lately as top competitors are becoming increasingly open about their use. It’s come to a point where there are only a small number of grapplers who are taking a stand against it, and Ruotolo is one of them.
When he was asked about it in an interview recently, Ruotolo made a solid point:
“There’s a lot of different arguments, things you can make to justify it or whatever. In almost every single other sport that I know it’s not legal or any real sport it’s not legal.
There are some competitors who have shared their arguments from the other side of the debate, with Gordon Ryan being among the most vocal about his reasons for using PEDs. For Ruotolo, the reasons to avoid them aren’t just personal ones:
“I think there’s so much that goes deeper than just the act of it. I don’t think a lot of people understand the influence their setting for the younger generations and that’s only become worse and worse and worse. I’ve seen it firsthand where you see 14 year olds, 15 year olds are taking steroids. You’re just like this is not healthy.”
Kade Ruotolo isn’t alone, Mikey Musumeci also shared his concerns that there are some kids in BJJ taking PEDs. That’s not something anyone should advocate for and even though many people on the other side of the debate would also be against it, the problem is that they are still setting an example in the sport. Ruotolo is among those setting a good example, but that doesn’t come without criticism:
“It’s a topic that I would talk a lot about back then, like a year or so ago, but now I’m at a point where I was almost getting backlash for talking against it in sense. I’m like I’m just going to take a backseat and my brother and I, we’re going to do things the way we believe that it should be done naturally.”
He’s not wrong either, Kade Ruotolo has been open about the fact that so many other BJJ competitors take PEDs before. He has generally been quieter on the topic in recent years, but it’s still something that matters to him a lot. He even used Gordon Ryan as an example of some of the pitfalls of PED use:
“Longevity aside, the reason why Gordon (Ryan) is only competing every two years right now or once a year or whatever it is — like right now I think he’s doing something with Mikey Musumeci are possibly going to do some sort of Ultimate Fighter type thing for jiu-jitsu possibly, I believe — and he can’t fight because of health issues. At the end of the day, he can never fight because of health issues.”
This has only added to the rumours that the UFC is building their own grappling league, and it’ll be interesting to see where that goes. The two coaches that Ruotolo says they’ve picked have plenty of history with one another and some of that has been around Ryan’s PED use. Unfortunately there’s not much that can be done about this from Ruotolo’s position, it’s really down to the individual grappling promotions. Just because he can’t change it himself, doesn’t mean he has to be happy about it:
“To each their own. Everyone can do whatever they want. It’s just frustrating when I’m out there slapping hands with my opponent, I know I’m doing everything that I can do naturally and I look at this guy and they may be putting half of the work in or if it’s not even the workload, just seeing they’ve got three traps on each one of their traps and two lats and you’re just like here we go.”
Interestingly, Kade also explained that the scrappy BJJ style that he and Tye Ruotolo employ was borne out of necessity when competing against athletes on PEDs:
“I feel like that’s also how my brother’s and I style has kind of been deemed sometimes you could say scrambly or just people will say certain ways to describe our games and it’s not even so much that our game is that we’re looking for crazy scrambles and trying to just snatch stuff, people don’t really realize that every act that we’re doing is fighting around strength. Because you can’t go head to head with these guys for strength.”
“When you’re technical and you have another technical guy and this guy takes steroids or all these different (drugs), it’s going to be that much harder to catch back up. Not only are you going to have to catch up by working on your technique overtime, you’re going to have to figure out how to fight around that strength.”
For the Ruotolo brothers, the answer was obvious:
“The only way you can fight around strength is you’ve got to be like water. That’s the way me and my brother try to operate.”
He finished off by referencing the mental aspect of building a reliance on PEDs, and how that might affect a competitor when they look back on their accomplishments:
“We know that when we get those results, we get those ‘W’s, we enjoy all of it with zero sense of like ‘I wonder if I could have done that without steroids. I wonder if they ask those questions because I could never live like that.”
The full interview with Kade Ruotolo where he discusses the use of PEDs in BJJ was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of MMAFighting:
