Gordon Ryan wasted little time in voicing his displeasure after the storm surrounding CJI 2’s rules reached its peak.
Representing his New Wave Jiu-Jitsu teammates, Ryan had plenty to say about how the event was handled – particularly the way the final match was decided.
The tournament concluded with a razor-close team battle between New Wave and B-Team Jiu-Jitsu.
After five rounds, no submissions were scored and the judges’ tallies came back even at 47–47.
What followed sparked chaos: under the tournament’s tiebreaker system, victory went to the team that won the final round, giving B-Team the crown.
Ryan had already hinted at bias before the event ended, so it was no shock when he openly disputed the outcome.
On social media, he argued that the tiebreaker was not part of the athletes’ contracts.
Instead, he claimed, the winner should have been determined by the team with the most individual match victories, which would have been New Wave.
At first, the anonymous investor behind CJI seemed to side with him, pledging to pay New Wave the million-dollar prize regardless of the official result.
But that decision didn’t settle matters for Ryan, who pushed further, demanding that the result itself be overturned.
Days later, however, the investor reversed course, stating that after reviewing the rules meetings with coaches, he believed the decision was valid and B-Team were the rightful champions.
This echoed what B-Team’s Damien Anderson had already made public: footage from a pre-event meeting where CJI judge Miha Perhavec explained the exact tiebreaker criteria that was ultimately applied.
Ryan’s frustration didn’t stop there. He also pointed to issues with the bracket seeding and the judging of individual matches.
Both Craig Jones and Perhavec have since addressed those concerns, defending the structure of the event and the application of the scoring system.
Ryan summed up his grievances in a lengthy post on his official Instagram account, making clear that the debate over CJI 2 is far from forgotten – at least in his eyes:
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