Fernando “Boi” Marques

Fernando Marques got the nickname Boi, bull in Portuguese, as a boy at a boxing session, when a training partner was stunned by his strength. Before jiu-jitsu he reached brown belt in karate, did boxing and full contact from age 9 and won Brazilian national titles in freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, earning a call-up to Brazil’s national team.

He started jiu-jitsu at 18 in Goiânia, at Frederico Pimentel’s academy, training mainly with Rodrigo Abrão. Introduced to André Pederneiras by João Roque, he began traveling to Rio de Janeiro to train at Nova União and received his black belt from Pederneiras in December 1999.

At his first Worlds as a black belt, in 2000, he took bronze at middleweight. In 2001, now at super-heavyweight, he won the division, with Gracie Barra’s Daniel Simões in second. In 2005, competing for his own team, he was world runner-up at heavyweight behind Robert Drysdale.

He created Fernando Boi Team in Goiânia, which athletes such as Bernardo Pitel and Juliana Vieira represented. A sixth-degree black belt, he still teaches seminars in Brazil and Europe, with recent stops in the Netherlands and Belgium.