André Galvão trains no-gi with Anderson Silva.
The life of a BJJ coach isn’t easy. Depending on his stature, branches scattered through the world are coordinated by him and his team, and often those athletes can fight each other. To André Galvão, leader of Atos, a similar case will occur soon, but in MMA.
The highly anticipated bout between Anderson Silva and Israel Adesanya at UFC Australia, next February 10th, marks an encounter between the former middleweight champion and the division’s new breakout star. And André Galvão had the opportunity to watch them both very closely.
Adesanya, a BJJ blue-belt, was promoted by Galvão, given that the Nigeria-born New Zealander trains at Atos Auckland. But Galvão was recruited for Anderson’s camp, and he has already agreed to sharpen the Spider’s ground game for the duel.
“Adesanya’s teacher is my student,” Galvão told Brazilian MMA site PVT. “He has lots of experience in MMA and kickboxing and follows our didactics for BJJ training. Since I’m the leader of Atos, he ends up becoming ‘my student,’ but really he trains with Eugene Bareman. He is very slippery, knows how to defend well and has a good technical level for MMA. He likes learning and goes to every seminar when we go to visit them.”
André Galvão after promoting Adesanya blue-belt in 2017.
“Anderson, on the other hand, has been a friend of mine for a long time,” Galvão added. “He has helped me a lot; he’s family. He invited me to help him. At the moment, I’m doing a seminar tour — the schedule is packed — but as soon as I’m done, I’m joining his camp. Israel knows this; indeed, as soon as the fight was announced, he sent me a message himself saying he’d understand if I needed to help Anderson for this fight.”
