In September 2022, a judoka from Swansea walked through the -60 kg bracket at the ADCC World Championship and did not concede a point in three matches. Ffion Davies became the first Welsh and the first British submission-grappling world champion — evidence that the sport's centre of gravity no longer sits only in Rio and San Diego.
In the -60 kg final at the 2022 ADCC World Championship in Las Vegas, Ffion Davies did not attempt a submission. She did not need to.
Across from her stood Brianna Ste-Marie, a Canadian black belt who had beaten most of the division to reach that mat and who would, over the following two years, remain one of the two or three best grapplers in the weight class in the world. For the length of the final, Davies passed her guard, took her back, controlled her hips, and rode out the clock behind a seatbelt grip while the score climbed. She won 10–0.
To reach the final she had already submitted Australia's Adele Fornarino in the first round and beaten Bia Mesquita — one of the most decorated Brazilian competitors of her generation, a multiple-time IBJJF world champion in the gi — 6–0 in the semifinal. Three matches. No points conceded. Gold.
The result made Davies the first Welsh submission-grappling world champion and the first from anywhere in the United Kingdom. It was also, read in the context of the previous decade, a piece of evidence rather than an anecdote: European jiu-jitsu, and specifically a small strand of it rooted in an academy in Dublin and a judo club in south Wales, had produced a grappler who beat the Brazilian and North American establishment at their own tournament without a close match.
Three years earlier, at ADCC 2019, Davies had reached the same final and lost it — caught in a toe hold by Bianca Basilio after submitting Bia Mesquita on the way. The 2022 run was the correction. This is the story of how a girl who started in judo at eight became the reference point in her division, and of the specific, unglamorous game — pass, back, choke — that got her there.
Ffion Davies did not win the -60 kg division by out-scrambling it. She won it by removing the scramble: pass the guard, take the back, and make the rest of the match a formality behind the seatbelt.
Ffion Eira Davies was born on 18 January 1995 in Swansea, Wales. She is a native Welsh speaker, and by the time she was competing internationally the framing of her as a Welsh athlete — not simply British — was one she carried deliberately. Her arrival in jiu-jitsu did not begin with jiu-jitsu at all.
Davies came up through judo. She began the sport around the age of eight, competed through the Welsh grades, and represented Wales as a junior — a Welsh and British Open champion at age-group level and a member of the Welsh national judo setup. That grounding matters more to her mat game than any single later influence. The grip fighting, the throws, the comfort in tight upper-body clinches, and above all the ne-waza sensibility — the assumption that the fastest route to a finish is to establish control first and attack second — are judo habits carried directly into her grappling. When she pins an opponent's hips before threatening the back, she is doing what a good junior judoka is drilled to do a thousand times: secure osae-komi first.
She came to Brazilian jiu-jitsu in her late teens, initially training in Wales under Chris Rees, the first Welsh BJJ black belt, and briefly touching the early-2010s British MMA scene before committing to grappling. The decisive move was to Darragh O'Conaill and East Coast Jiu-Jitsu (ECJJA) in Dublin, where she relocated to train full time. O'Conaill promoted Davies to black belt on 27 November 2018 — a promotion that, within a matter of months, would be validated at the highest level of the sport.
Her lineage, as recorded by BJJ Heroes, runs Carlos Gracie → Hélio Gracie → Royler Gracie → Saulo Ribeiro → Alexandre "Xande" Ribeiro → Darragh O'Conaill → Ffion Davies — a Ribeiro-school pedigree filtered through an Irish academy rather than a Brazilian or Californian one. That geography is part of the point. Davies is not a product of the traditional pipelines. She is a product of a European room that decided it did not need them.
As her competitive profile grew, Davies broadened her camp, training internationally with Atos and working with coach JT Torres in the period around her 2022 title run. The through-line across every affiliation stayed the same: judo grips, relentless passing, and a back-attack system built to end matches rather than merely lead them.
Davies's résumé is unusual in that it spans both rule sets — gi and no-gi — at the very top, and in that its centrepiece is the discipline that resists point-farming most: ADCC submission grappling.
ADCC. Davies won the -60 kg division at the 2022 ADCC World Championship, the sport's most prestigious no-gi event, held every two years. She reached the same final at ADCC 2019 and took silver, losing to Bianca Basilio by toe hold after submitting the pre-tournament favourite Bia Mesquita in the semifinal. The two-tournament arc — silver, then gold — is the spine of her standing in the sport. ADCC gold in a stacked women's division is, by common consent, the single hardest title to win in grappling, and Davies won it having conceded no points across the bracket.
IBJJF, gi. Davies is a two-time IBJJF World Champion in the gi, winning the black-belt lightweight division in 2022 and 2023. The 2022 title made her the first Welsh and first British black belt to win the gi Worlds. She also holds a 2019 gi Worlds bronze, a 2019 Pan American gold, and European Championship golds — including a double at lightweight and open weight in 2020.
IBJJF, no-gi. Davies is a multiple-time No-Gi World Champion: she won at featherweight in 2018, at lightweight in 2021, and in 2023 took double gold in both the lightweight and open (absolute) divisions — reportedly the first lightweight athlete to win no-gi Worlds double gold, beating larger women to do it. Taken together with her gi titles, this makes her the first British or Welsh black-belt world champion in both the gi and no-gi.
The absolute gold is the detail worth pausing on. Open-weight divisions reward size, and a lightweight winning one is winning against a structural disadvantage — every match is against someone heavier, often materially so. That the same top-pressure-and-back game held up against larger opponents, rather than only against her own weight class, is the strongest single argument that the method is not a product of favourable matchups. It travels up the weight ladder. That is rare, and in the women's field it is close to unique.
The game. What ties the record together is a style that is easier to describe than to defend against. Davies is, first, a guard passer. She prefers to be on top, using judo-quality grips and pressure to flatten and pass rather than to play a bottom guard — a preference that already sets her apart from much of the women's field, where bottom-game specialists remain common. Once she passes, the objective is singular: the back. Davies's back-control system — the seatbelt and hooks or body triangle, the hand-fighting to expose the neck, the transition into the rear-naked choke (mata-leão) — is the finishing engine of her career and the subject of her own instructional teaching.
She is not one-dimensional. Her lower-body game is real: the 2019 ADCC final was a leg-lock battle she lost by toe hold, and she attacks and defends heel-hook and ashi-garami positions competently in the modern no-gi ruleset. But the identity is top pressure into back control into choke. It is a game with very little variance — which is precisely why it produced a 10–0 ADCC final and a semifinal won 6–0 against an elite Brazilian, rather than a highlight-reel scramble.
Her nickname on the circuit — "The Honeybadger" — fits the method more than the temperament: small, relentless, and disproportionately hard to move once attached.
By 2026, Davies occupies a specific and slightly unusual place in the sport: a gi-and-no-gi world champion who has, in effect, migrated into the professional superfight and event circuit rather than chasing every IBJJF season.
After the 2022–2023 peak — ADCC gold, back-to-back gi Worlds, no-gi double gold — Davies leaned into the invitational and promotional formats that increasingly define elite grappling's visible layer. She defended and contested titles across Polaris, competed in emerging pro formats, and in August 2024 won a superfight at the inaugural Craig Jones Invitational (CJI) against Mackenzie Dern — a former IBJJF world champion and ranked UFC strawweight — by armbar. That result, over an opponent with genuine crossover fame, did as much for Davies's public profile outside the hardcore grappling audience as any IBJJF final. She has since operated under an exclusive UFC Fight Pass grappling contract, the kind of arrangement that only a handful of grapplers command.
Her significance in 2026 is partly sporting and partly structural. Sportingly, she is one of the small group of women — alongside the likes of Ste-Marie, Dern, Amy Campo, and Elisabeth Clay — whose matches the division is organised around. Structurally, she is the clearest single argument against the lingering assumption that the best grappling talent is grown only in Brazil and the United States. Davies is Welsh, judo-raised, black-belted in Dublin. She did not relocate to Rio or San Diego to become world champion; she became world champion first, then moved through the sport on her own terms.
It is worth being precise about what that changed. For most of the sport's history, the path to a world title ran through a small number of famous academies in two countries, and the athletes who reached the top had almost always trained inside them for years. Davies did not follow that path and did not need to. The competitive infrastructure she came up through — a Welsh judo pipeline, a Dublin black-belt academy, a European competition circuit — was enough, by itself, to produce the hardest title in the sport. For the generation of British and European grapplers training now, that is the practical meaning of her career: the ceiling is no longer somewhere else.
The one open question the era poses for her is the same one that faces every grappler who wins the hardest title early: what the second act looks like. ADCC 2022 was the summit. Whether she chases another ADCC cycle, keeps building a superfight legacy, or moves toward MMA — a door her early record and judo base leave open — is, as of this writing, unresolved.
Five results that define Davies's standing, each verifiable against event records and archives.
Davies submitted the division's pre-tournament favourite, a multiple-time IBJJF world champion, on the way to the 2019 final. The win announced her as a genuine ADCC contender rather than a European outsider, and made the toe-hold loss that followed a matter of a single exchange rather than a gap in level.
The loss that framed everything after it. Basilio caught Davies in a toe hold in a leg-lock exchange to take gold and hand Davies silver. It is the rare defeat that reads, in retrospect, as a necessary step: the correction came exactly one ADCC cycle later.
A second decisive win over Mesquita, this time on points and without the leg-lock drama — Davies controlling the exchanges and building a 6–0 lead to reach the final. Evidence that the 2019 submission was a pattern, not an upset.
The title match. Davies passed, took the back, and controlled Ste-Marie for a 10–0 decision to become the first Welsh and first British ADCC world champion, conceding no points across the entire bracket.
Against a former IBJJF world champion and ranked UFC athlete, in one of the highest-profile grappling promotions of its year, Davies won by armbar. The result extended her relevance well beyond the traditional IBJJF/ADCC audience.
White belt sees Davies's game and learns the least glamorous lesson in jiu-jitsu: top position wins matches. Before any back attack, there is a pass; before any pass, there is a grip. The white belt's version of the Davies game is simply to get on top and stay there.
Blue belt learns that the back is not a lucky accident but a destination. The blue belt who studies Davies stops treating back control as something that happens after a scramble and starts treating it as the thing the whole sequence is built toward — pass to consolidate, consolidate to climb to the back.
Purple belt learns the seatbelt and the hand fight. Taking the back is one skill; keeping it against a competent escape is another. The purple-belt version of this game is the maintenance layer — seatbelt over hooks or body triangle, chest glued to the shoulder blades, hands fighting for the exposed neck before the choke is ever threatened.
Brown belt integrates the judo. Davies's grips and clinch are not add-ons; they are the entry to everything on top. The brown belt who wants this game seriously has to build the standing and grip-fighting phase that feeds the pass — the part most no-gi players skip.
Black belt removes the variance. The mark of the Davies game at the highest level is not a flashier finish; it is the absence of the scramble. A 10–0 ADCC final and a 6–0 semifinal are the product of a black belt who has made the match boring on purpose, because boring — for her opponent — is another word for controlled.
The Davies-style top-and-back game is widely copied and widely botched. Five errors show up constantly in the rooms trying to build it.
1. Chasing the back before the pass is finished. The most common error is leaving a half-completed pass to jump to the back, giving the opponent the hips back. Davies consolidates the pass — chest pressure, hips controlled — before she starts climbing. The back is a reward for finishing the pass, not a shortcut past it.
2. Hooks before the seatbelt. New players insert both hooks and then wonder why they get bucked off. The seatbelt (the over-under harness on the torso) is the control; the hooks or body triangle are secondary. Upper-body control first, lower-body control second — the reverse gets you thrown off the back.
3. Reaching for the choke too early. The rear-naked choke is the end of a hand fight, not the start of one. Grabbing for the neck before the near-side hand is controlled hands the opponent the exact frame they need to peel the grip and escape. Win the hands, expose the neck, then the choke appears.
4. Treating the leg game as an afterthought. Davies lost an ADCC final to a leg lock. A top-pressure passer who cannot defend a heel hook or a toe hold in the modern no-gi ruleset is one exchange away from the same result. The passing game and the leg-entanglement defence are the same skill viewed from two sides.
5. Skipping the grip fight. Copying the back attacks while ignoring the judo grips that set up the pass is building the roof without the walls. The entry — grips, clinch, the flatten — is where the control originates. Without it, the rest of the sequence never starts.
At open mat this week, isolate the back-control maintenance round. Start already on your partner's back, seatbelt established, no hooks. Your only job for a three-minute round is to keep the seatbelt and stay chest-to-back while your partner tries to escape; you may not attack the choke. When you can hold it, add the hand fight — still no finish, just exposing the near-side neck.
Only in the third round do you add the finish: from a controlled seatbelt and a winning hand fight, take the rear-naked choke and nothing else. No armbars, no transitions. This forces the actual order of the Davies game — control, hands, choke — instead of the beginner's order, which is to lunge for the neck and lose the back. Add a fourth round from a passed-guard start, so the pass-to-back transition gets its own repetitions. Run the sequence weekly.
Davies's game is a specific route through the modern no-gi and gi landscape — top pressure into a back-attack finish — and it connects to several other pages in the bjj.media map.
The map point is that Davies is a top-game, back-attack specialist in an era that often rewards bottom-game leg lockers. She is proof that the older logic — get on top, take the back, finish — still wins the hardest titles.
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