Fellow competitors at the Moringão gymnasium in Londrina, in northern Paraná, watched a no-gi jiu-jitsu match turn into a medical emergency on Friday, August 22, when a young athlete experienced a serious neck injury mid-match.
The referee overseeing the match recognized the severity of what had happened and stopped the action immediately so medical staff could reach the competitor. According to those who were competing in the same tournament, he was rushed to the intensive care unit shortly after.
Details of exactly what led to the injury are still emerging, but multiple people who were at the venue described a moment where the competitor ended up inverted, with his head lowered and body weight bearing down onto his neck from an opponent in a dominant position.
Whatever the mechanics, the outcome was serious enough that organizers pulled the match from the schedule and the athlete was moved to intensive care for observation and treatment.
The clip of the incident spread quickly once it hit social media, and the reaction from the grappling community was immediate. Training partners, coaches and spectators flooded the original post with alarm, many of them zeroing in on the fact that the athlete who caused the injury holds a black belt, a rank that in Brazilian jiu-jitsu is supposed to come with a deep understanding of how to control an opponent without endangering their spine or neck.
Several commenters called for the sport’s governing bodies to open a formal investigation and hand down consequences, while others simply expressed disbelief that a competitive submission match could end with someone hauled off to intensive care.
As of the most recent updates shared by people close to the tournament, the affected competitor’s condition and long-term prognosis had not been made public.
Neck and spine injuries are the nightmare scenario every jiu-jitsu competitor understands is technically possible but rarely expects to actually witness, let alone experience.
Jack Greener knows that reality better than almost anyone. On January 7, 2018, the then 23-year-old college senior was training on a mat in San Diego when his C4 vertebra broke. He still remembers the sound of it.
Greener compares it to watching someone chop wood, where the final crack echoes through the forest. His body tried to spring up off the mat. Nothing happened. A warm flushing sensation spread through him, and just like that, he was paralyzed.
What followed was a nine hour surgery, a series of strokes within the first 12 hours as blood clots from his damaged vertebral artery traveled to his brain, and a legal battle that stretched on for seven years before ending in one of the largest personal injury settlements in grappling sports history.
A jury eventually awarded him $46 million, which grew to $55 million with interest. “I never asked for that number right so that number was originally awarded by a jury,” Greener has said, making clear the figure was never his own demand.
Greener’s diagnosis, C4 incomplete quadriplegia, means the damage to his fourth cervical vertebra compromised function throughout his entire body below that point. He has been blunt about what that actually looks like day to day: constant involuntary muscle spasms, no temperature sensation from the nipples down, and a total loss of independent bowel and bladder control. He has also been blunt about the ceiling on recovery.
“There’s no such thing as a full recovery with spinal cord injury and anyone that says there is is full of [ ] or trying to sell you something,” he has said, noting that the spinal cord “is the only thing that doesn’t heal on the human body.”
What makes Greener’s story land the way it does isn’t just the severity of what happened to him. It’s that even after everything, years of rehabilitation, a relationship that ended over concerns about his disability, and a legal fig ht that included attempts to intimidate him outside courtrooms, he still refuses to turn his back on the sport that broke his neck.
“Do I regret training? No. I still think it’s a cool sport,” he has said. When a friend nervously told him he had just started training at a well known gym in New York, Greener didn’t hesitate. “Dude, I’m so stoked that you’re training. Like, if I could still train, I probably would,” he told him.
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