Her Name is Rio

Our journey began with this letter inviting us to participate in the CBJJ World Championships of Jiu Jitsu, or the Mundial, or the Mundials, as BJJ competitors in the US variously called the most important event of the year.

2004 was promising for me. I was adventurous enough not to care about where my income would come from, and energetic enough to make it work anyway.

Everyone serious about jiu jitsu talked about visiting Brazil. It was often described as the Mecca of BJJ, which is interesting since Mecca is a city and Brazil is a nation-state, but the point is that everyone in BJJ wanted to make the pilgrimage. I was not immune.

Neither of my parents had left the US, although my mom’s dad was stationed in Greenland during WWII. Apparently, he was told to look for anomalies in reconnaissance photos, but then to immediately forget any words he read.

I was thus very keen to travel internationally, having never done that myself.

My friend and BJJ instructor Eric and I decided to make it happen, financial consequences be damned. Eric had started Richmond BJJ just two years earlier, and since expenses and income were just about even, he worked at a coffee shop grinding it out. I was roughly in a similar financial spot myself, so this would be a real sacrifice for both of us.

Sacrifice we did, and we made it to Rio de Janeiro in July of 2004.

This is a pic I took from a potato camera, but you can still see how utterly different this landscape was from the southeastern US, my main baseline for most of my life up until that point.

Eric really rocked that speedo! And, our local hosts were extremely accommodating.

I was only here for a couple of weeks, and jiu jitsu dominated my focus for this trip.

In such a whirlwind, I didn’t get to experience much of Rio’s culture, apart from jiu jitsu and a little of the food culture. I went back a year later and had a lot more time to explore, and I’ve kept learning about Rio in bits and pieces ever since then.

Just ten years after Columbus had first crossed the Atlantic Ocean, a Portuguese expedition sailed into what is now called Guanabara Bay on January 1, 1502. In their haste to name this exotic and beautiful place, they called it the River of January, or Rio de Janeiro.

For a long time, Rio was the capital of Brazil—both when it was a colony and as an independent nation. The capital has moved to Brasília, where it has been since 1960, but there is a sense of lingering bureaucracy in Rio that carries over into the modern CBJJ/IBJJF: see the letter I opened with here. We always had a lot of hoops to jump through if we wanted to compete in Rio.

Meanwhile, heavily contrasting the antiquated rigidity of civilization—that legacy of colonialism—nature just comes right into the heart of the city. Rocky cliffs rise up as pristine beaches cut in close to the frenzy of activity on the other side of Avenida Atlântica.

If Rio is any one thing (and it definitely is not), it is the constant tension between nature and human, or the frontier between chaos and order. In 2004, I think I got some sense of this, but missed most of it due to making weigh ins and having to jump through a ton of bureaucratic hoops, both inside and outside of jiu jitsu.