Shavkat Rakhomonov is one of the top welterweight fighters in the UFC right now and as an expert Sambo competitor with plenty of BJJ training too, he’s in a good position to weigh in on the rivalry between the two sports. It’s been ongoing for decades and the early members of the Gracie family like Rickson Gracie used to enter Sambo tournaments and test their skills against those competitors. Although the rivalry was fierce back then, it died down over the years and by the time that BJJ started to enter the mainstream consciousness in the late 2010s it was practically non-existent.
Then ONE Championship decided to start booking grappling matches between elite BJJ competitors and some of Sambo world champions. They’ve now done this several times over and the story is the same every time. Sambo competitors are always competent grapplers but their knowledge of leglocks tends to be significantly lower than the BJJ competitors. Kade Ruotolo won one of the promotion’s titles by heelhooking a Sambo veteran and perhaps the most notable example happened a little earlier than that, when Mikey Musumeci launched into a series of brutal leg attacks against Gantamur Bayanduuren.
Craig Jones has even openly said that he thinks Sambo competitors ‘are terrified of heel hooks.’ Luke Thomas of Morning Kombat has clearly noticed this too, as he referenced the gap in leglock knowledge when he asked Shavkat Rakhmonov about the competition between Sambo and BJJ. Rakhmonov was pretty quick to answer what he sees as the difference between the two sports:
“I think Jiu-Jitsu is better in the ground game, maybe that’s why. Jiu-Jitsu is a much more popular sport in the world and Sambo is not so much developed in the world.”
The full interview with Shavkat Rakhmonov where he discusses the rivalry between Sambo and BJJ was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Morning Kombat:
