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Home » BJJ Lifestyle & Culture » Will Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu be in the Olympics?
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Will Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu be in the Olympics?

- John Q. Whitebelt

Posted by John Q. Whitebelt in BJJ Lifestyle & Culture | 1 comment

bjj brazil brazilian jiu-jitsu olympics

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  1. This solution has been deemed correct by the post author

    76
    7-28-13
    Aesopian says:

    No, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu will NOT be in the Olympics.

    When it was announced that the 2016 Olympics would take place in Rio, a surge of enthusiasm ran through the BJJ community. Maybe our favorite grappling art could make it into the Olympics! As an Olympic event, BJJ would receive a worldwide boost in recognition and popularity, athletes would get bigger sponsorship deals, and your mom would finally stop asking if you were still doing karate or capoeira or whatever.

    If you were one of those hopefuls, I’m sorry to crush your dreams, but BJJ will not be in the Olympics any time soon. But before you cry about how lame sports like curling and rhythmic gymnastics are included over BJJ, you should know what it takes to get an event into the Olympics, and how martial arts are effected by becoming Olympics sports.

    The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has established criteria for sports to be accepted into the Olympics. The IOC doesn’t care how many Facebook likes “I bet 1,000,000 people want to see BJJ in the Olympics” gets. (If Facebook outrage and online petitions mattered, wrestling wouldn’t have been dropped.) BJJ is up against many far popular and politically connected sports.

    Here is a quick list of reasons why the IOC won’t consider BJJ for the Olympic games:

    • BJJ doesn’t have broad enough international adoption outside of Brazil, USA and Japan.
    • BJJ doesn’t have a unified international organization, though the IBJJF is working for the spot.
    • BJJ has virtually no anti-doping efforts, except for a little at the most recent IBJJF Worlds.
    • One country would dominate all divisions (hint: it’s Brazil).
    • Not enough women do BJJ.
    • No TV or press coverage.
    • Other martial arts like Sport Jujitsu and Karate are already IOC recognized sports, and BJJ is not.
    • BJJ would have a hard time differentiating itself from Olympic Judo.
    • BJJ isn’t very entertaining to outside spectators. (Yes, I know a lot of Olympic events are boring too.)

    MMA doesn’t have any better odds of making it into the Olympics either. We could have talked about a form of no-gi submission grappling making it into the Olympics if FILA wasn’t currently struggling to get wrestling back in by 2020. 

    So BJJ isn’t going to be the in Olympics, but is that actually bad? A significant attitude in the BJJ community is that sport rules are already taking BJJ away from its roots in self-defense, vale tudo, and MMA. Being in the Olympics would only make this worse.

    If you look at the history of judo, tae kwon do, wrestling, and boxing, you see each morphing into bizarro world versions of themselves that are hyper-focused on their increasingly restrictive Olympic rules. BJJ is an offshoot of original judo, and they used to share many traits. Olympic Judo is now a sport where you can be disqualified for touching someone’s legs, and turtling with both hands stuck inside your collar is an acceptable tactic. We’re not even going to talk about tae kwon do and its “bounce around with your hands by your side and throw nothing but spinning wheel kicks” strategy.

    For now, let’s just enjoy the many high level BJJ tournaments we already have. Maybe in 50 years we can talk about BJJ making into the Olympics over hover boarding, The Running Man, and Rollerball.

    Further reading:

    • Why BJJ will never be in the Olympics
    • The Story of How the Olympics Passed Jiu-Jitsu By
    • Why BJJ Won’t Be Olympic Sport Anytime Soon
    • BJJ in the Olympics
    • BJJ in the Olympics with GracieMag Editor-in-Chief Luca Atalla
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