One From Eight
Eleven weeks ago eight people won this region's only route to the world championship. On Saturday and Sunday, seven of them lost — five to an athlete who reached the final or won the division. The eighth submitted three opponents and came home with bronze.
Melbourne — The ADCC World Championship closed on Sunday night in Kraków. Of the eight athletes who came out of Carrara in June — the entire representation of a region running from Kazakhstan to New Zealand — one stood on a podium.
Daniel Schuardt, of Precision MMA & Conditioning, entered the −99kg division seeded thirteenth of sixteen. He submitted Michael Pixley at 5:11, then Eoghan O'Flanagan at 8:18, and arrived in a semifinal against Kaynan Duarte, a four-time ADCC champion. Duarte caught him with a cross-face at 8:52. In the bronze-medal match Schuardt submitted Achilles Rocha with a lateral kneebar at 6:01.
Three submissions in four matches at a world championship. The only man to beat him lost the final to Luke Griffith later the same evening, and then lost the superfight to Yuri Simões.
The pattern is in the seeds. Belal Etiabari entered +99kg as the sixteenth seed and drew Felipe Pena, the first. Kaya Rudolph entered −77kg fourteenth and drew PJ Barch, the third, losing 2–0; Barch went on to take silver. Roberto Dib Frias, seeded eighth at −88kg, was submitted at 6:10 by Pawel Jaworski, who won the division.
In the women's brackets of eight, all three of the region's qualifiers reached a quarterfinal and all three met the eventual champion there. Kanae Ikeda was submitted by Jasmine Rocha at −55kg. Nadia Frankland lost 2–0 to Ana Carolina Vieira at −65kg. Matilda Reid was submitted by Helena Crevar at +65kg at 9:11. Rocha, Vieira and Crevar each won gold.
Bekzat Kapashov went out in the first round at −66kg to Dorian Olivarez. Accounts of how differ, and we have not been able to settle it — see the note below.
A region that is allocated one qualifying event arrives at the world championship almost entirely unseeded, and meets the top of the bracket in the opening round. That is not a judgement about the eight. It is an arithmetic consequence of how the invitations are allocated, and it is the thing worth arguing about between now and the next cycle.
The man who won the region's only medal had his name wrong in the write-up of it
In June this paper corrected two errors that had stood in the public record for eleven weeks. In Kraków the same athletes were misnamed again, in the published brackets and results of the outlets that cover this sport.
FloGrappling's published bracket lists the −77kg qualifier as Kieran Rudolph. ADCC's official trials results say Kaya Rudolph. The same bracket lists the −88kg qualifier as River Frias; ADCC's official results say Roberto Dib Frias. BJJ Heroes' results page names the −99kg bronze medallist David Schuardt. He is Daniel Schuardt. The same page files the women's lightest division as 60kg; ADCC's bracket and FloGrappling's own semifinal listing both have it at −55kg.
None of this is malice and none of it is unusual. It is what happens when nobody's job is to keep the register. A result that is filed under the wrong name is not a record — it is a rumour with a time stamp.