Two weeks out from the ADCC World Championship on September 12 and 13 at Tauron Arena in Kraków, Poland, the most prestigious event in submission grappling arrives carrying a problem that has nothing to do with technique. The women competing there have fewer divisions, less prize money, and fewer paths to qualify than the men, and this year they lost an entire category without the organization ever announcing it.
On top of that, the competitor list raises a question ADCC has still not answered: what actually earns an athlete a direct invitation.
The women’s absolute disappeared without a word
The women’s absolute, the division that in 2024 crowned the best female grappler in the world regardless of weight, does not exist in 2026. Specialist media noticed the removal back in February, with no official statement from the organization, and the practical damage runs two ways, since the athletes lost both the category that generated the most visibility and the prize money attached to it. On the men’s side, the absolute is still running.
The rest of the numbers follow the same shape. Men compete across five divisions of 16 athletes, which comes to 80 spots. Women compete across three divisions of 8 athletes, 24 spots total. A male champion takes home $20,000. A female champion takes home $10,000. And here is a detail worth stopping on: the runner-up in any men’s division also takes home $10,000. Second place on their side earns exactly what first place earns on hers. At third, it is $3,000 for them and $2,000 for her.
The prize table ADCC published itself on February 22 is the document that speaks loudest. It lists the five men’s divisions, the three women’s divisions, and a single line labelled Absolute, paying $50,000 to the winner, five times what a weight-class champion earns. There is no women’s absolute anywhere on that table. The category was never cut by announcement, it simply went missing inside the championship’s own official prize document, which totals $362,000.
The gap opens even earlier, at the door. In the trials, a man gets two chances to qualify per region across five divisions. A woman gets one chance across three. A group of athletes put out a petition asking for 16 women per division at the 2026 Worlds, matching the men, and full parity at five weight classes by 2028. None of it was granted.
Adele Fornarino won two divisions at ADCC 2024, the -55kg and the absolute. She was the first woman to take both in the same edition since 2007, and the first athlete in the event’s history to win the absolute coming out of the lightest weight class. The absolute she won is exactly the one that no longer exists in 2026. Fornarino pulled her name from this year’s tournament, pointing to pay, to the structure of the women’s divisions, and above all to how the organization handled an athlete safety case.
The case Fornarino was talking about
Izaak Michell, an Australian based in Austin, won the Asia and Oceania trials and secured his place at Worlds. In December, a woman went to the Hays County Sheriff’s Office in Texas, and on the 23rd a judge issued a warrant for his arrest on a charge of sexual assault, which under Texas law is a second-degree felony. A second warrant followed, more women reportedly came forward to authorities, and Texas police made a public appeal for him to turn himself in. Michell landed on the county’s list of twelve most wanted fugitives.
He stayed in the official ADCC 2026 bracket with those warrants active. The removal came later and came quietly, with no statement and no explanation, his name simply vanishing from the published roster and the spot going to Britain’s Taylor Pearman in July. As of publication, the allegations against Michell have not been tested in court and he has not been convicted.
An organization that takes that long to pull a wanted man facing a sexual assault charge from its card, then does it without saying a word, is telling its athletes something fairly plain about where safety sits on the priority list.
One invite, one qualifier
Here is the part that hits Brazilian women’s jiu-jitsu directly.
In May, BJJ Girls Mag reported that athlete Lívia Barasine accuses Ana Rodrigues, listed by ADCC as Anna Rodrigues, and athlete Diego Sodré of pressuring her to drop her abuse complaint against coach Melqui Galvão, who is in preventive custody in Brazil under investigation for sexual crimes against adolescents. In Lívia’s account, the two encouraged her to stay connected to the coach under investigation and suggested competitive opportunity tied to her silence.
Ana Rodrigues denied all of it in a ten-minute public video, saying that “at no point, not to me and not to Diego, did Lívia report that she had suffered abuse or violence,” and maintaining that the screenshots circulating online were stripped of context. Diego Sodré denied it through his attorney, whose statement says it is “categorically false that I attempted to dissuade, influence or prevent any person from reporting or investigating alleged sexual crimes.” Both responses are preserved in full in the original report, and we reproduce them here again because the right of reply does not expire.
Three months on, both athletes appear on the same Worlds roster, and they got there by different routes.
Lívia Barasine qualified by winning her trials bracket and taking the -65kg spot on the mat, and Ana Rodrigues received a direct invitation to -55kg.
It is worth saying plainly that Ana was most likely invited on the strength of her years in the sport and the titles she has accumulated, while Lívia reached black belt recently, after standing out through the coloured belts. On purely sporting grounds the invitation explains itself without any effort, and that is not what this report questions.
The question is about ADCC, not about the athletes. The May accusation is public, it circulated in the specialist press, and everyone named responded to it. The lawsuits involving Roberto Cyborg are public too, and one of them, as noted below, was decided in his favour. Knowing all of that, the organization chose to keep both invitations. The question stands.
And it is worth recording what exists and what does not. ADCC publishes a Code of Conduct with zero tolerance for harassment, intimidation and bullying, providing for removal from the event and a possible ban from future ones. That document governs the ADCC Opens, the entry-level tournaments anyone can sign up for. For Worlds, the elite invitation-only event paying out $362,000, we could not locate any public selection criteria or equivalent conduct policy anywhere on the organization’s official pages. In practice, the championship anyone can enter has written rules about behaviour, and the championship you can only be invited to does not.
Cyborg Abreu, three editions running
The same question applies on the men’s side, where it goes back further.
Roberto “Cyborg” Abreu, founder of Fight Sports and absolute silver medalist at ADCC 2024, is confirmed at -99kg in Kraków. Five years ago this month, in August 2021, the jiu-jitsu community learned about the case of Marcel Goncalves, a black belt instructor at a Fight Sports location in Florida who had been arrested in March 2018 and accused of raping a teenage student. According to police records reported at the time, Goncalves admitted to having sex with the minor. He later moved to argue insanity stemming from chronic traumatic encephalopathy as his defense in the criminal case.
In December 2021, a civil suit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court named Goncalves, Abreu and Fight Sports. It alleged that Abreu tried to silence the victim, sheltered Goncalves after his arrest, and had prior knowledge of sexual misconduct without acting on it. Abreu is godfather to Goncalves’s youngest son. As the story spread, he stripped Goncalves of his black belt and announced a zero tolerance policy across the association.
In June 2023, Judge Jose Rodriguez granted summary judgment in favor of Abreu and Fight Sports, finding that Goncalves’s conduct was not in furtherance of the business objectives and that the employer did not facilitate the abuse. The ruling did not extend to Goncalves, and the plaintiff kept her right to appeal. This is worth stating flatly, because it matters: in that case, Roberto Abreu and Fight Sports were not found liable.
A second suit surfaced in 2023 in Texas, brought by Mandy Schneider against coach Rodrigo da Costa Oliveira of Rockstar Martial Arts in Frisco, with Abreu and Fight Sports again among those named. The filing argued that “the repeated failures of Roberto Abreu and Fight Sports to ensure the safety of underage athletes have fostered an environment ripe for such abuse.” Oliveira was charged by Frisco police with trafficking a child to engage in sexual conduct.
Cyborg competed at ADCC 2022, competed at ADCC 2024, and returns in 2026. No pause, no review, no sign that the organization ever looked at it.
What we asked ADCC
BJJ Girls Mag contacted ADCC by email on August 25, 2026, with a response deadline of the morning of August 28, and asked three direct questions: what criteria determine a direct invitation to Worlds, whether conduct outside competition factors into that decision, and whether the organization intends to bring back the women’s absolute and equalize prize money and roster spots in future editions. We also asked why Izaak Michell’s removal from the bracket was never announced publicly.
No response had arrived by the time this piece was published. The invitation stands, and any statement from the organization will be published in full.
Why this is bigger than backstage gossip
You can look at all of this and call it a set of unrelated issues. The absolute was a budget cut. Invites are a commercial call. An American civil suit has nothing to do with a tournament bracket. Taken one at a time, each piece has a plausible explanation.
Put them together and they draw the same picture. An organization that quietly cuts the division that gave women the biggest stage, pays half, sets aside $50,000 for an absolute only men contest, offers half the qualifying chances, keeps a wanted man in the bracket until the pressure builds, and hands out invitations without ever naming its criteria is telling its female athletes exactly where they sit.