Kayla Harrison is at the top of the UFC bantamweight division, and her roots in combat sports run deep in judo.

She began training at just six years old, guided by her mother, a judo black belt.
From there, Harrison quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming one of the most accomplished judoka in history.

She won Olympic gold twice – once in 2008 and again in 2012 – making her the first and still only American to achieve that feat.

In a recent conversation with Jorge Masvidal, she didn’t hold back when discussing one of the sport’s most controversial rule changes:

You can’t grab legs, even though it’s literally a throw. There’s a book that the founder of judo wrote, and there are 67 main throws of judo, and a double leg is one of them.
But they banned it.

I’m like, how are you going to ban an original throw?
It doesn’t even make sense. It’s political.

The ban on leg grabs, introduced by the International Judo Federation around 2010, has been widely debated – and Harrison shares the frustration of many who trained before the change:

It’s probably why they banned it because now Japan is very, very traditional, and from my perspective, kind of boring.
You’re not really allowed to grip fight anymore. A lot of stuff has been taken out.

Beyond stylistic preferences, she believes the impact went even deeper, particularly for nations whose success relied on those techniques:

When they got rid of leg grabs, it did kind of mess up Cuba.
But for a long time, especially women’s judo in Cuba, they were scary.

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