Ricardo De La Riva

Ricardo De La Riva is one of the few fighters whose name became a position. The De La Riva guard, in which the bottom player hooks the outside of a standing opponent’s leg, was born in training at Carlson Gracie’s academy in Rio in the 1980s and is now part of the basic Jiu-Jitsu repertoire around the world.

Born in Rio in 1965, he started training in January 1980. Before it carried his surname, the position had another nickname among his training partners: the “pudding guard.” He told the story himself on social media. Once he locked in the position, “the opponent had to fight to keep his base and ended up wobbling.” The name that stuck came after his win over Royler Gracie, who was unbeaten until then, at the Copa Cantão in the mid-1980s.

His black belt came from Carlson Gracie in 1986. “It took me a year to go from brown to black, which was quick at the time,” he told GracieMag in 2016. In the same interview he said he could not pin down exactly when he created the hook that carries his name and recalled that Murilo Bustamante was the training partner he rolled with most. He stopped competing in 1993 and came back in 2002, at 37, to take featherweight bronze at the Worlds. The following year he competed at ADCC.

A seventh-degree coral belt, he runs his own team, with schools in Brazil and abroad, and his students have included brothers Rodrigo “Minotauro” and Rogério “Minotouro” Nogueira. “The belt represents an achievement, but the real legacy is in what we teach,” he wrote.