Adele Fornarino Withdraws From ADCC 2026 Over BJJ Pay Equity
Adele Fornarino just did something most competitors spend a career avoiding: she walked away from the biggest stage in the sport on principle. This week the ADCC Absolute champion announced she's…
Adele Fornarino just did something most competitors spend a career avoiding: she walked away from the biggest stage in the sport on principle. This week the ADCC Absolute champion announced she's pulling out of ADCC 2026, and her explanation reads less like a scheduling conflict and more like a list of grievances the women's side of BJJ and no-gi grappling has been quietly accumulating for years.
What actually pushed her out
According to her comments, reported by BJJEE, Fornarino's most pressing concern wasn't pay at all — it was safety. She pointed to ADCC's slow response in pulling Izaak Michell from competition after an arrest warrant was issued for him, calling it "a very easy, simple decision" that the organization let slide past the point of being useful. You can watch her full comments here. Her read on it is blunt: ADCC had a chance to take a clear, positive stance for the community and let the moment pass.
From there the list gets longer. ADCC recently raised pay for the men's divisions — which Fornarino says is genuinely deserved — but the women's purse stayed at roughly half. Her point isn't that the men shouldn't have gotten a raise; it's that having fewer competitors in a division isn't a reason to pay the ones who show up less. On top of that, ADCC quietly dropped both the women's Absolute division and the women's super fight without much explanation, which stung personally — Fornarino won the Absolute and, by the usual logic, had earned a shot at that super fight. It disappeared instead. Put the travel, the camp, the two years of preparation next to a event that offers no show money, and she says the math for competing simply doesn't work anymore. She's shifted her attention to UFC BJJ instead, an organization she credits with putting real weight behind women's matches — four female bouts on a single main card, by her count, treated the same as the men's.
Why this matters beyond one athlete's decision
It's tempting to read this as one competitor's personal frustration, but Fornarino isn't a fringe voice in Jiu Jitsu — she's an ADCC Absolute champion, which is about as credible a platform as the women's side of the sport has. When someone at that level says the numbers don't work, it's worth taking seriously rather than filing it under athlete complaints.
The tension here isn't new to grappling. Every combat sport that's grown quickly has had to work out, often painfully, how pay scales when men's and women's divisions don't yet have equal depth of competitors or equal television exposure. BJJ and submission grappling are still early in that process compared to sports like tennis or soccer, where decades of advocacy eventually forced structural change. ADCC in particular has been the sport's biggest stage since 1998, and how it treats its biggest names sets the tone for every regional promotion and academy watching from below.
For the average person training BJJ, none of this changes what happens on the mats tonight. But it shapes what the sport looks like for the next generation of competitors deciding whether elite-level Jiu Jitsu is a viable path or an expensive hobby subsidized by a day job. Every young competitor watching this unfold — especially the women training toward ADCC as the goal — is absorbing a lesson about what the sport currently values, whether that lesson is intended or not.
What comes next
Fornarino hasn't retired, and she isn't walking away from grappling — she's walking toward a promotion she believes is actually investing in her. That distinction matters. This isn't a story about someone giving up on Jiu Jitsu; it's a story about an athlete using the leverage she's earned to push for something better, and betting that other organizations will compete for the athletes ADCC undervalues.
Whether ADCC responds with structural changes or lets this pass the way it let the Michell situation pass is the real story to watch. Either way, the conversation Fornarino has started isn't going away quietly. See you on the mats.
Original report via BJJEE.