Aftermath of UFC 100 Sparks Comments from Rickson Gracie"The UFC champion is impressive as an athlete. But he has holes in his game like anybody else. Technically, he is not as good as Fedor. It would take me longer to submit Fedor than it would him" says Rickson.
"I am not worried about his abilities. Whether he punches at me on the ground or standing, it is only a matter of time. In some ways, it is easier if he tries to punch at me standing. All the simpler to take him down. It ends in an armbar or a strangle regardless" finishes Gracie.
I love how articles like this continue to piss off MMA fans. More to the point, though, is that the Brock Lesnar phenomenon is something that Rickson anticipated - with less than total enthusiasm -
from an interview a few years ago.
Concerning mixed martial arts, after an interview a few readers thought you criticized the technical level of today’s fighters, that in your opinion that level was sinking. How do you compare today’s athletes with the ones of yore?
I don’t think the level of the athletes is sinking. I see the time of the fights I being diminished, that the athletic part of athletes is more and more involved with hard training, sometimes even steroids. So people become super-men, super-strong, super-aggressive, super-explosive, and all that energy added to the low time limit reduces the need of showing technique. You have to be a bull, to get in there and win with your horns, not with your mind. So this natural development of the sport makes technique be left aside a little bit. This makes fighters level themselves down, because the sport no longer demands them to pay attention to detail. If you take off the gi and go into a five minute bout where you can use all your strength at once, nonstop… Why even bother about detail, technical carefulness? What you need are muscles! Besides, all styles got mixed up, there is no more style versus style, the athlete has a basic notion of how to defend because, in general, defending is a lot easier than attacking, so all you have to do is explode and resist for five minutes. So most fight finales nowadays end up being sudden knockouts. You don’t see as often a technique, a triangle, a back-taking. It all becomes sort of void of technique.
