Felipe Pena and Gordon Ryan will face each other once again – for the fourth time in total – in February 2023, at a Who’s Number One (WNO) event.
This time around, though, “Preguiça” is preparing for the match at Atos Jiu-Jitsu; together with Andre Galvao.
Pena spoke about it in a recent video on his YouTube channel:
Most of the time, I believe I’ll be training at “Atos” with Galvao.
The main things I’m looking for now is, first, a gym that offers heavy training and high-level fighters to practice with and get me out of my comfort zone.
That will push me forward every day to do everything right, to get good sleep, knowing that the next day it will be another challenge. The kind of practice that stays in your mind the whole day, that gives you a new challenge every day.
He explained that he’d love to do the camp with his team, Gracie Barra, but that the present circumstances prevent him from doing so:
It would be nice to do the camp with Gracie Barra, my team; but they currently don’t have a gym focused on high level competition, with many black belts training together.
Lately, Gracie Barra has been developing lots of young athletes – purple and brown belts – and the black belts are split apart.I still represent Gracie Barra, the team is in my heart, but I will do this camp away for a few months.
Nearing the end of preparation, Pena will train with Draculino and side-by-side with other top athletes:
I’ll be training with Andre Galvao, who has a lot of experience and I deeply admire him, so I hope to learn a lot from him and everyone else there.
After that, I will do a short camp with Draculino, probably in the last weeks prior to the match.
It’s in Houston and we are planning to unite some top fighters there to help on the build-up; and to make the last adjustments to my game.
Gordon Ryan shared his opinion of Pena’s decision:
This is so incredible for so many reasons. But the number one reason is the rivalry between Pena and Andre was one of the biggest rivalries ever in the sport and the two genuinely don’t like each other.
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