This article is part of our Craig Jones Invitational 2024 coverage. To get live results, play by play, and commentary, we’ll have a live updates article running all weekend.
Lucas ‘Hulk’ Barbosa has just become the latest elite grappler to enter the Craig Jones Invitational, and he will now be joining the stacked under 80kg division. Although Barbosa had not actually been officially confirmed for ADCC 2024 prior to this announcement, he was eligible for an automatic invite due to the promotion’s practices. Barbosa has won multiple medals at ADCC over the years and any of the medalists from the last edition of the tournament are always given the opportunity to return. He earned a silver medal in the under 88kg division during his most recent appearance at ADCC 2022, and he’d be a top contender at that weight again.
Barbosa has actually been steadily dropping down in weight over the years, as his first ADCC medal was a bronze one in the under 99kg division in 2019. Now it seems like Lucas ‘Hulk’ Barbosa is continuing his efforts to compete in lighter weight classes, as he will be dropping all the way down to under 80kg for the Craig Jones Invitational. It’s not as if he’s never competed in the lighter weight classes though and in fact, he started out his black belt career going as low as under 77kg.
Barbosa won multiple IBJJF No Gi World Championship gold medals before he ever stepped on the mats at ADCC and he steadily went up the weight classes back then. He won titles at medium-heavyweight, heavyweight, and super-heavyweight from 2015 to 2017, including an absolute title in the final year. Barbosa has been a key figure at the highest level of the sport for almost a decade now and he will be a force to be reckoned with in the under 80kg lineup at CJI. There are only a handful of competitors announced so far, but already he will have to face some of the best grapplers in the world like Nicky Ryan and Andrew Tackett.
Lucas ‘Hulk’ Barbosa announced the news that he was competing in the under 80kg division of the Craig Jones Invitational in a recent post to his official Instagram account:
