Reinier de Ridder is the reigning ONE Championship middleweight world champion, and he believes that he can hang with the best grapplers around. He’s going to need to be able to as well, as he is taking on Tye Ruotolo in a submission grappling superfight at ONE Fight Night 10. De Ridder has been working hard to prepare for that match too, and he recently opened up about who he’s been training with:
“To be honest, I’m pretty confident right now. I’ve been training with some of the ADCC champs there, in Texas; Gordon and John (Danaher) have really helped me out technique-wise. Got a lot of rounds in with (Giancarlo) Bodoni and (Nicholas) Meregali. And to be honest, I think I did pretty well against those guys. So yeah, I think I can hang with top grapplers. And I’m very excited to get a chance to show that this time.”
Training with this level of partner is only going to improve his chances of beating Tye Ruotolo, and will obviously help his MMA career in the long run too. De Ridder broke down how he saw his match with Ruotolo going as well:
“I think it’s gonna be a very close matchup. Very explosive… And the one who can conserve his energy for the 10-minute round will come on top in the end.”
Reinier de Ridder has actually been open about the fact that he wants to compete in more BJJ matches once his MMA career is done too, so it’ll be interesting to see how he performs against one of the best grapplers on the planet right now. Fans already got a glimpse of that actually, as he fought Andre Galvao to a draw at ONE X about a year ago. As de Ridder explains, there was a huge difference between this match and his upcoming one against Ruotolo:
“Galvao I took on three week’s notice, coming from an MMA fight. Not really having any time to prepare for grappling. And now, I’ve just been grappling for months and I’ll be grappling for two more months, before the match happens. That gives me a lot of confidence. I can hang with the best in the world while just doing MMA… Maybe I can submit more of the best in the world if I’m just focused on grappling.”
The full interview with Reinier de Ridder where he talks about his ability to keep pace with the best grapplers around was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of the South China Morning Post:
