Interview by Hywel Teague Photo by Alexandre Mazei

2015 middleweight World Champion Claudio Calasans, who competes in the ADCC 2015 World Championship at 88kg, says he feels gi and no-gi are two different sports. The ATOS black belt and life long judo practitioner joined up with teammate Gilbert  Durinho Burns in an effort to focus on preparations for the biennial tournament. He gave us an insight into his training with UFC lightweight Burns and described the challenges of competing in a division where he s likely to face his ATOS teammates.

You hooked up with your friend Gilbert Durinho Burns in the final weeks before ADCC, how was the training? The training with Durinho was really tough, I like to train with him because he s a guy with the same style as me, he s very complete. He s a guy who s very tough, very good at wrestling, he has a good guard, good guard passing, good submissions... We have a very similar style.

We are now in no-gi season, how did you adapt your training to prepare? Earlier this year I won the World Championships in the gi, which was the only major title I was missing. But soon after I managed to include some no-gi competition and wrestling, and I won the ADCC trials. I was focussed on the gi but I managed to adapt my game for no-gi, which is completely different. No-gi is a different sport, totally different. Everything you do in one, you can't do in the other. Everything changes. Even more so in the ADCC, that has specific rules, different to the IBJJF. So after the World Championships, I took off the gi and focussed 100% on no-gi.

You decided to fight at 88kg, was this because of your teammates in the 77kg division or you didn't want to cut weight? I won the 88kg qualifier, I had the option to change my weight to 77(kg), but there is this rule in the ADCC that you will fight your teammates in the first round. As I'd already trained with Davi Ramos, Durinho, JT Torres of ATOS as well, my priority was to avoid this. The 88kg division has two ATOS athletes, Keenan [Cornelius] and another student of Andre Galvao [Mike Perez], but I haven't trained with them much. There is a chance I could face them near the beginning.

How do you analyze your division? It s a tough division, everybody's really tough. At ADCC, you can have guy who's really well prepared, who knows the rules really well. ADCC is truly a war, if you don t fight well the match will go to overtime, there's a lot of strategy. To be prepared to fight for 20 minutes in the rounds, and then 40 minutes in the final, sure you could finish the fight but you've got to be prepared for this.




Be sure to check back here for more news and updates on for the 2015 ADCC World Championship.