Helen Maroulis is the first female American wrestler to become an Olympic champion and she recently got accused of sandbagging when it came to her deciding to pursue Jiu-Jitsu for the first time. It only came to light because she made the decision to compete in the IBJJF No Gi World Championship as a blue belt, but she explained that she only has a few weeks of Jiu-Jitsu training. Obviously she has years of grappling training under her belt but without any instruction on Jiu-Jitsu, the IBJJF belt requirements actually prevent her from competing any higher than blue belt anyway.
When she saw that some people were accusing her of sandbagging, she wanted to take the time to address those concerns:
“I’m just really gonna quickly speak to something that I read on the internet this morning, which was that I’m sandbagging by entering the IBJJF no gi world championship at blue belt and I just wanna clarify some things. So I started Jiu-Jitsu exactly five weeks ago, it’s the first time I ever took a class. I have friends that do it but I never really watched it, didn’t even know the rules, nothing. It started because I had a back injury and they told me that I couldn’t wrestle, and I couldn’t dance, and I couldn’t play golf. I was like ‘can I try Jiu-Jitsu?’”
One of the main counterpoints to the claims is that Helen Maroulis truly has nothing to gain from sandbagging anyway. She’s an American wrestling legend and is incredibly decorated in her original sport, a colored belt world title doesn’t really men anything in comparison to those accomplishments. She went on to explain that her goal is just to have fun doing her new hobby:
“Then I became obsessed with it, and loved it. My roommate and her boyfriend were talking about how they were gonna go compete at this tournament and it’s gonna be in Vegas. I was like ‘oh sweet! That would be so fun, I’d love to do it too!’ I asked the professors and the coaches ‘hey, is it possible if I train every day could I like, not even be competitive, but can I just make sure I don’t get hurt?’ That was like my only goal. I just want to go compete, have fun.”
With less than five weeks of preparation, it wasn’t long for Maroulis to adapt to the completely new ruleset and technical differences. She’s actually spoken to quite a few people about making the transition and sandbagging has never even come up before:
“Long story short, I do what I always do when I like hobbies and I get super-obsessed. Then I ended up coming out to New York for some work stuff, got connected with this awesome gym here, had the same conversation with them and nobody was like ‘oh yeah dude you shouldn’t do this, you’ll be sandbagging.’ Everyone was like ‘you have a lot to learn and we gotta make sure that you can basically pick this up super fast in a couple of weeks!’”
Maroulis signed off by explaining just how much she respects Jiu-Jitsu, and it’s always great to see elite competitors from other grappling styles falling in love with the sport:
“The last point I do wanna say is that I’m someone that I deeply, deeply care about like the culture of the environment I enter into. I know that it’s not wrestling and I didn’t expect it to be wrestling. I’m not trying to bring my expectations or experiences with wrestling solely into this.”
Helen Maroulis addressed the people accusing her of sandbagging in a recent post to her official Instagram account:
