Craig Jones Admits PED Use: \"100% Cheating\" In BJJ

Craig Jones has never been one to dodge an uncomfortable question, and the latest one he's answered cuts to the bone of competitive Jiu Jitsu. Appearing in a new documentary by Nathaniel Cho examining drug testing in combat sports, the Australian grappler did something almost nobody at the top of the BJJ food chain ever does: he stated plainly that he used performance enhancing drugs, and that doing so made him a cheater. "I do also wholeheartedly believe I am cheating," Jones said, per BJJEE's report. Watch the clip on YouTube.

It's a strange thing to admire, an athlete telling you he broke the rules. But there's a difference between a confession and the careful non-denial we usually get, and Jones gave the former.

What he actually said

The headline grabs the word "cheating," but the substance underneath it is more interesting. Jones described himself in his early years as "built like a chopstick," and said he lost matches he felt he should have won simply because stronger opponents could impose grips and pressure he couldn't match. That, he explained, is what eventually pushed him toward testosterone. He even told the story of his first injection going sideways — a botched shot that left him unable to sit comfortably for days.

The detail that should make every competition organizer sit up, though, is about timing. Reflecting on his breakout run at ADCC 2017 — the tournament that turned him from unknown into a name — Jones said that if officials had tested him that weekend, he'd have passed clean. "But I definitely blasted for a 6-month period prior to that," he added. He built the engine in the off-season, then showed up to compete after the substances had cleared his system.

The testing problem nobody wants to name

Jones's broader point is the one the sport keeps avoiding: meaningful drug testing in grappling is, for now, mostly a fantasy. His comparison was characteristically blunt — authorities can't even keep drugs out of prisons, so the idea that a low-budget sport could fund the kind of year-round, out-of-competition testing program that actually catches anything is, in his view, naive.

He's not wrong about the economics. Real anti-doping — the kind that works in Olympic sport — relies on a biological passport, surprise out-of-competition collections, and a lab budget that dwarfs the entire prize purse of most grappling events. Single-day, announced testing at the tournament itself is the easiest protocol in the world to plan around, exactly as Jones described doing. ADCC and a handful of promotions have run drug-tested divisions and brackets, and those efforts are worth something. But anyone who tells you the grappling scene is clean is selling you the same comfortable fiction the sport has told itself for twenty years.

Why this matters to the average BJJ practitioner

Here's where it gets uncomfortable, because the conversation doesn't stop at the elite level. If you train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at a normal gym, nobody is testing anybody. The masters competitor cutting weight for a local IBJJF event, the hobbyist who suddenly recovers like he's 22 again — the honest truth is that PED use exists at every level of the sport, not just on the ADCC stage.

That doesn't mean you should be paranoid about your training partners. It means the comparison you make on the mats — "why can't I hold this guy down" — is built on incomplete information. Jones is giving you permission to stop measuring your jiu-jitsu against someone else's body and start measuring it against your own technique. Strength is real and it matters, but it's also the variable most likely to be quietly chemically inflated in the person across from you. The technical problem you're trying to solve is the only one fully under your control.

There's also a quieter lesson in honesty here. Jones isn't asking for a pass; he's putting the truth on record and letting people judge it. The BJJ community spends a lot of energy on heroes and villains, on who's clean and who isn't, while the actual testing infrastructure that would answer the question doesn't exist. An athlete willing to say "yes, I did it, and yes, that's cheating" at least moves the conversation off the comfortable lie.

Where this leaves the sport

Jones has built much of his public persona on saying out loud what others won't — about money, about promotions, about ADCC politics. This is the same instinct pointed inward. None of it changes his results, and he isn't pretending it should. But it does force a question the sport has dodged for a generation: if we can't or won't test seriously, do we keep treating "drug-free" as a marketing claim, or do we get honest about what competitive grappling actually is?

That's not a question one Australian can answer alone. It's one the whole Jiu Jitsu community is going to have to sit with — and Jones, characteristically, just made it harder to look away.

See you on the mats.

Original report via BJJEE.