It’s sad news for Jiu-Jitsu competitors all around Asia as the second ADCC Asia and Oceania Trials event has unfortunately now been cancelled, the only one staged in the continent. Originally, one of those two trials event was set to take place in Australia while the other would take place in Singapore in order to allow BJJ competitors from around the continent a much closer avenue for qualification. The Singapore trials was originally due to be the first, taking place in December 2021, but things were already looking bad for the event when it was postponed until 2022.
This all happened as a result of restrictions still in place to combat the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, and little has changed in the months since the trials were postponed. This is what has led to the cancellation of this ADCC trials event altogether, and now the two female qualification spots will be transferred to the other Asia and Oceania trial in Australia. As of yet, there’s no news on what will happen to the five qualification spots that would have been available to the male competitors and whether or not these will instead be given out as invites to the event.
Several competitors are understandably upset or frustrated by the news and have shown that in the comment section:
Young-Am Noh – I won 2 times Asian trials before. I made No gi culture big here Korea and I made no gi squad. We were training so hard for this Asian trials. Super sad.
Kit Dale – Sucks I can’t even enter Aus lol.
While this obviously has shocked some competitors, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time that this might be a possibility. We spoke to ADCC head organizer Mo Jassim at the end of 2020 and even then he made it clear that trying to fit every trials event into a short time-frame was an incredibly difficult proposition. The officials at ADCC have also responded to some complaints about the cancellation and reiterated the same sentiment:
“We don’t have time to reschedule anymore. Worlds is in September. We have trials in April may and June already.”
The news of the second ADCC Asia and Oceania trials event being cancelled was announced in a post to the promotion’s official Instagram account:
