THE MENDES BROTHERS AND THE MODERN COMPETITION GAME

Rafael Mendes and his older brother Guilherme were born in São Paulo and began training as small children at the academy of their father, Ramon Lemos. By the time they reached black belt — Rafael in 2008, Guilherme in 2007 — they had already accumulated dozens of major-tournament wins as lower belts and were known within the Brazilian competition scene as the most technically prepared lightweights of their generation. What they did at black belt over the next eight years would change competitive jiu jitsu permanently.

The innovations began with the berimbolo. In the late 2000s the Mendes brothers and their training group at Ramon Lemos's academy in São Paulo (which would later become the Atos team) developed and refined the inverted back-take from De La Riva guard that came to be called the berimbolo. The technique was so unusual visually — the bottom player rolling under the standing opponent's leg to emerge on their back — that early observers dismissed it as a curiosity. By 2012, after Rafael had used it to win three consecutive IBJJF World Championships, it had become the most-copied technique in the lightweight divisions globally.

The second major innovation was the leg drag pass, refined by the Mendes brothers as the natural counter to the berimbolo and to any guard whose bottom player relied on hooks under the opponent's far leg. The technique pulls the opponent's near leg across the centerline while pinning the far hip, removing the angle the bottom player needs for any of the modern open-guard sweeps. Combined with the knee cut and the torreando, the leg drag completed the three-pillar pressure passing system that defined high-level passing throughout the 2010s.

The third innovation was less a technique than an approach to pedagogy. The Mendes brothers and the Atos team trained at a level of technical precision and competitive intensity that had not been seen in BJJ before. Daily sessions involved hundreds of repetitions of single positions, video review of every competition match, and a systematic focus on grip strength and conditioning that imported elements from wrestling and Olympic weightlifting. The competitive results — multiple IBJJF World Championships, ADCC titles, and dominance across the Pan-American and European tournaments — established the methodology as the new standard.

The broader consequence of the Mendes era was the codification of competition BJJ as a discrete discipline distinct from the self-defense and vale tudo traditions that had preceded it. By the time Rafael Mendes retired from active competition in the mid-2010s, the gap between competition jiu jitsu and self-defense jiu jitsu had widened to the point where many high-level competitors would never have to apply their techniques in a real altercation, and many self-defense practitioners would never have to apply theirs in competition. The split was always implicit in the art's history, but the Mendes brothers' competitive run was the period in which it became explicit and structural.

The brothers founded the Art of Jiu Jitsu Academy in Costa Mesa, California, in 2015, where they continue to coach a competition program that has produced multiple world champions — most notably Tainan Dalpra and Mica Galvao, whose 2020s competition runs build directly on the technical and pedagogical foundation the Mendes brothers established. The IBJJF World Championship divisions at lightweight and middleweight in the modern era are, in technical terms, downstream of two decades of Mendes innovation.