From "Down Under" To The Top Of The Game: Rising Star Adele Fornarino
From "Down Under" To The Top Of The Game: Rising Star Adele Fornarino
The ADCC veteran has her sights set at the top of the mountain, and has put together a solid 2023 headed into her first try at a No-Gi World title this year
Ahead of IBJJF No-Gi Worlds, Australia's Adele Fornarino has been on a journey, to say the least: Perth to Singapore to compete at ADCC Trials. Perth to Melbourne to meet up with her partner. Melbourne to San Diego to conclude her No-Gi Worlds camp at Atos Headquarters. And, finally, San Diego to Las Vegas to compete at the last major competition of the jiu-jitsu calendar.
The only bigger whirlwind than Fornarino’s travel schedule is her last year on the elite jiu-jitsu scene. The end of 2022 was punctuated by a formidable debut at the ADCC World Championships and the final performance of her brown belt career: a dominant, submission-heavy performance at No-Gi Worlds.
As 2023–her rookie year at black belt–draws to a close, Fornarino returns both to Las Vegas and to No-Gi Worlds with a few more feathers in her cap.
She went toe to toe with Mayssa Bastos–twice–and causing a near upset in the finals of 2023 Brasileiros in May. She also submitted her way to her first two black belt titles: No-Gi Pans in October followed by No-Gi Euros in November. Most recently, winning ADCC Asia & Oceania Trials–again.
As Fornarino looks to repeat her success at No-Gi Worlds this week, she does not expect to stop there. The girl from "down under” has her sights set on the top of the game, and she plans on playing there for the years to come.
WATCH: Adele Fornarino vs Mayssa Bastos | 2023 IBJJF Brasileiro
Adele’s Career Ambitions: From Local Cop to Jiu-Jitsu Athlete
Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, Adele Fornarino did not grow up with plans to become a globetrotting grappler. Adele’s parents worked traditional corporate jobs, she didn’t know anyone who trained jiu-jitsu, and while she was a sporty kid, her athletic spirit wasn’t directed toward a professional end so much as oriented around her desire to follow in her older brother’s footsteps: “Anything my brother did, I tended to do," she says. "If my brother played soccer, I wanted to play soccer.”
Her ultimate career in jiu-jitsu emerged by chance from career ambitions in a different field: law enforcement.
“When I got to be about nine or ten years old, I made the executive decision, ‘ I'm gonna be a police officer.’ I thought doing a martial art would help, so one day I Googled something like martial arts near me. I saw a gym, and the gym happened to do jiu-jitsu. If there had been a karate gym closer, I would have done karate, but it just happened to be a jiu-jitsu gym, and I happened to kind of fall into it. The rest is history.”
Aside from wanting to learn a skill that could help her in a future job, Adele’s motivation for training was nurtured by her first coach at Dominance MMA, David Christopher:
“[He] is an excellent kids coach, and he was really good at keeping us all interested, playing lots of games. He was a really big part of why I loved it so much from a really young age. Christopher also had a big role in keeping her focused: “I was always ‘that kid,’ asking things like, ‘So when are we gonna start hitting things? When are we going to start throwing punches?’ [David] was like, it's not quite that. It’s a little bit different. I’d be like, ‘Yeah, but what are we gonna start punching people?’ It took me a while to understand what was going on.”
Adele’s full-time focus on jiu-jitsu emerged organically over the following years as she began competing in jiu-jitsu and her interest in jiu-jitsu surpassed her preexisting interest in soccer. She noticed that she preferred the individual accountability required for jiu-jitsu over the team reliance required for soccer: “I’d get frustrated at team sports all the time because you always have to rely on other people and on teammates. Obviously there’s a team aspect to jiu-jitsu. You can't do it without a team. But it's still like a single person sport. I get to be in full control of my jiu-jitsu.”
Another factor that tilted the scales from soccer to jiu-jitsu? Her teenage belief that the latter would cause her less knee pain, naivety she looks back on with a laugh: “Funny enough at the time, my knees were playing up when I was a kid just from probably growing pains. I was a striker and every time I sprinted really fast, my knees would get really sore and my hamstrings would start to hurt. So I decided to do jiu-jitsu, because that's the logical path, you know?”
From Australia to the World: Witnessing the Scale of Competitive Jiu-Jitsu and Going Pro
Adele did her first jiu-jitsu competition at age twelve–she won, and, still competing in the kids’ divisions, relished the opportunity to compete against the boys.
“I was really motivated by beating up guys at the time. Because I had done soccer and I'd done it with guys and girls, I'd always wanted to compete with the guys to make sure that I was just as strong, just as fast. When I started jiu-jitsu and I was one of the only girls, I wanted to get good enough at jiu-jitsu to be just as good if not better than all the boys in the class. And then when I was competing, I was like, ‘I just want to beat up all the boys.’”
As she got older and brackets began separating the boys from the girls, a lack of female opponents led Adele to begin competing in the white belt adult divisions. One tournament, in particular, would be the game-changer for her career: the 2015 edition of Grappling Tournaments Australia (GTA). Adele won and clinched a life-changing grand prize associated with winning her division: a paid ticket to the 2016 IBJJF World Championships, her first-ever international competition.
At first, she didn’t think much of the opportunity to fly to California and compete at Worlds. “I didn't really think about the impact it was gonna have at the time. I was like, ’Oh, a free trip to go overseas!’ kind of thing."
In hindsight, the trip became a turning point for her career. When she came back to Australia, she returned with a World title (Blue Belt, Juvenile 2, Lightweight) with a changed perspective on the size of the jiu-jitsu world and the possibilities available to her:
“[My coach] David Hart came with me and he guided me through that process, explaining ‘This is how big jiu-jitsu is. Like you saw it in Australia, but this is actually how big it is. There's thousands of people here, and there's these people that do it professionally.’ It opened up my eyes to how big jiu-jitsu really was.
From the archives: Adele Fornarino at World 2016
"We stayed for the black belt finals, and I remember seeing the crowd going crazy and yelling out and doing their chants. I was mesmerized by it because my only exposure I had to that was soccer. It was very cool to see how excited people were getting about jiu-jitsu, and as a sixteen-year-old I was losing my mind, thinking, ‘This is amazing. It's the best thing ever. I want to be there [competing as a black belt] one day.’”
Reaching Black Belt, Cultivating Confidence
Seven years later, the moment of watching Worlds as a Juvenile Blue Belt came full circle as Adele competed at her first Worlds at Black Belt in 2023.
“It felt very, very surreal,” she recalls, “and it was also very nerve-racking going in there for the first time.”
Though Adele was confident in her abilities, she was not yet sure if she could measure up to the competition at Black Belt:
“Black belt kind of snuck up on me. Like all of a sudden I was a black belt, and then all of a sudden I was in these black belt divisions with all these people that I've been watching and studying and looking up to for so many years. When you watch these girls, you put them so far ahead of you. At the time it felt unattainable to get anywhere close to them, like it's gonna take years and years. Then I’m there and I’m like, ‘Oh wait a second. I can do this. I can get there. I'm there. I can get this done.”
Despite rising to prominence and cultivating a reputation on the competition scene as a no-gi athlete, one of Adele’s biggest goals in jiu-jitsu is becoming the first native Australian to bring back an IBJJF Wworld tItle in the gi. It’s not something she expects will be easy, especially while continuing to pursue excellence in the no gi game, but it’s something she’s committed to achieving over the long arc of her competitive career.
“The gi is hard!” she admits. “I won’t be able to be like, ‘Oh yeah, I'll just train gi for a week and then I'll win gi Worlds.’ That's not how it goes. It’s one of those things where it's going to take some time. It's going to take a lot of preparation and for the right year to come around for everything to find its place.”
Even without prioritizing the gi in 2023, Adele was able to hang with and challenge some of the most accomplished grapplers in the gi in her division. If her matches against Mayssa Bastos and Jessa Khan are what Adele looks like with a light camp in the gi, fans have a lot to look forward to when Adele chooses to invest in the gi with full force in the future.
But first, there’s a no gi season to attend to.
Fall 2023: Adele’s Latest and Greatest No-Gi Season Yet
Just over a year since her debut at the ADCC World Championships, Fornarino has continued to build on the momentum she generated on the no gi scene in 2022. In the last few months, Adele has proven that she can deliver exciting, dynamic performances at the black belt level against anyone and anywhere in the world: across No Gi Pans in Dallas, TX, No-Gi Euros in Rome, and the first ADCC Asia & Oceania Trials in Singapore, she racked up three gold medals, a seven-match win streak, and a 100% submission rate.
Her performance at ADCC Trials, in particular, was a notable one for Adele, as it was her first time competing in ADCC’s recently-minted -55kg women’s division. After struggling to put on more weight for the -60kg division at the ADCC World Championships last year, Adele was especially excited about being able to compete in a weight class that was closer to her walking weight. She was also excited about the kinds of athletes she might encounter in the new division.
“[-55kg] is a great weight class for me. I was really excited to see what kind of girls were entering that division and what they were gonna weigh on the day of the actual competition as well–because my guess is if it's day-before weigh-ins for the Trials then the actual ADCC the day-before, too.” Short of some uneasiness from some bracketing hiccups the night before the tournament, the returning ADCC Trials champion showed no sign of nerves on the mat, making quick work of her new division with roughly three minutes of total mat time across her three matches.
No Gi Worlds and Beyond: Adele’s Broader Competitive Goals
For her upcoming division at No-Gi Worlds, Adele is eager to bring her jiu-jitsu to anyone she faces in the Featherweight division, but expressed particular interest in two potential opponents: fellow ADCC Trials Winner, Alex Enriquez and 2022 No-Gi Worlds Silver Medalist, Jasmine Rocha.
“I think at this point because we both represent Atos, [Enriquez and I] would only meet in the finals, but she put on a really good performance at [the First North American] ADCC Trials, and that would be a really cool match.”
Referring to the trash talk ahead of Jasmine Rocha’s most recent match against Ffion Davies, Fornarino adds, “A Rocha match would be great. I'm sure [Jasmine] is walking around telling everybody that I'm just gonna go out there and do my basic closed guard. But you know. She can find out how it works.” Much like Davies’ “basic knee cut”, Fornarino’s “basic closed guard” is no joke: it’s proven effective throughout her competitive career and serves as a dangerous hub for her submission-oriented game.
As for other grapplers she would particularly like to face in the coming months, Adele is keen to take on anyone, whether a new opponent or a rematch, that gives her a chance at a rigorous, interesting, technical match: “I really enjoy technical battles. I think that that's why I really enjoyed my matches with Mayssa, for instance. She's a very technical fighter and I get a lot of enjoyment out of that technical battle, back and forth. I want to move, I want to explore different positions. I want to have matches like that where I can look back and be like, ‘Oh there were so many things going on,’ matches with technical jiu-jitsu that's very aesthetic to watch.”
Beyond ADCC and IBJJF, when it comes competition in the coming year, Adele has her sights set on superfight promotions that encourage submission-heavy performances, including Polaris, UFC Fight Pass, and WNO:
“As an Australian, it can be really difficult–obviously the travel is difficult, flights and accommodation can be tough, and sometimes we may get a little bit overlooked for those reasons. But I definitely want to get my foot in the door on those major fight cards, because I think I can have some really good matches with current belt holders and I think I can draw a whole new audience to some of these events as well.”
Encouraged by her experiences over the last year, Adele has started dreaming bigger when it comes to her jiu-jitsu ambitions: “My goals as an athlete have dramatically changed over the past year: originally, they were to get a gi world title and then to get a No-Gi Worlds title. Now I’m at the point where I want all of them multiple times. Multiple World Titles. Multiple ADCC titles. I want to go toe to toe with these guys who put on their Instagram handles that they're like six-time world champions, and I truly believe that those goals are attainable for me. Especially after feeling those high-level girls that I've had the privilege of being up against, I know that I'm there, and I know that I can make small adjustments to just be consistently winning at this level.
A New Beginning: Adele Spreads Her Wings to Atos
One thing that sets Adele apart as an athlete is the geographical dispersion and strength of coaches and training partners supporting her journey.
“I’ve been really privileged in that way. A lot of people have given me their time and their energy to learn from them, and I’ve gotten so many different things and different perspectives.”
For most of Adele’s career, her base of support for jiu-jitsu was restricted to Australia: most of Adele’s jiu-jitsu “upbringing” was anchored Melbourne under longtime coaches David Hart, David Christpher, and Lincoln Handcock, with the exception of three years living in Perth and training under Jake O’Driscoll. In the last year, however, Adele drastically increased the scope of her support from Australia to America–specifically to San Diego, California–when Adele made the decision to compete under Atos.
Adele visited Atos Headquarters for the first time in November 2022 to complete her camp for No Gi Worlds in 2022. Her teammates from Dominance MMA had been to Atos before for a camp and came back to Melbourne with only positive things to say about the experience. The place left a mark on her for a few reasons: the quality of training, the abundance of experienced training partners close to her size–something that was hard for her to come by in a single room in Australia–and, most of all, the culture.
“It starts from the top down, when Andre Galvao walks in. He's getting everybody ready. He's always in a good mood. He's always pushing everybody, motivating everybody. Everybody's having a good time, they're training hard, and everybody's happy.”
After that first visit in 2022, people she’d trained with at Atos stayed in touch with her, checking in, seeing when she might be back, congratulating her on her performances throughout the year. Six months after her first visit, she came back to San Diego to train for the week before the IBJJF World Championships. When she returned in September to wrap up her camp for No-Gi Pans, she made things official in her relationship with Atos, formally representing the team in that competition and moving forward.
The team welcomed her in with open arms. “Everyone was asking ‘What can we do to help? Let us know what you need. Let us know how we can support you.’ A big thing for me was how nice everybody was. When they got excited, then I got excited, and it made everything even more exciting.”
Fornarino adds even more muscle to a stacked Atos roster for No-Gi Worlds, including fellow newcomers to the team like Maggie Grindatti along with former No-Gi World Champions like Rafaela Guedes. With heavy hitters from Atos in nearly every weight class from Roosterweight to Heavyweight, Adele has high hopes in representing the Featherweight division for the team: “I feel like I can bring really good, technical jiu-jitsu to that division and I feel good about how that division’s gonna play out for me.”
Family and Loved Ones: The Constants on the Journey
Beyond all the support she has on the mats, Adele has plenty of support off of them.
One major source of support is her partner, Nev: “My partner puts up with a lot of travel, a lot of stress, and a lot of my crankiness from cutting weight and all that kind of stuff. She's been so incredibly patient.” Adele credits Nev’s past experience as a competitive tennis player for helping her adopt a more strategic, professional approach to jiu-jitsu. In turn, Adele’s expertise has rubbed off on Nev: Nev will be competing at No Gi Worlds in the Blue Belt Featherweight division.
Another significant source of support is her family. From driving her to first competitions as a kid to watching her entire run at the 2022 ADCC Trials in Sydney, to watching her in Rome at No-Gi Euros, her Melbourne-based family continues to show up and root for her. One tender moment stands out to Adele from a few months ago:
“I put up a video on my Instagram when I came home from No-Gi Pans: they were holding this massive poster at the airport. It was like, ‘Congratulations, Adele for winning Pan Americans Black Belt!' It had photos of me, my dad had made it, and it absolutely melted my heart. Now every major that I win, he makes a poster for me.”
Mr. Fornarino has already made two such posters this year–one for No-Gi Pans and one for No-Gi Euros. If all goes well this weekend at No-Gi Worlds, he’ll have a third poster to make before the end of the year. If all Adele’s dreams come true, he’ll be making a lot more posters in the years to come.
Win or lose, Adele considers herself fortunate: “I'm so lucky. I love all the people that have had a part to play in my journey, and I feel like I can't be grateful enough.”