From eight-year-old girl bullied for her size to highly decorated professional athlete, Gabi Garcia says she was born a fighter. With her second MMA fight just hours away at Rizin Fighting Federation 1, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion is confident and motivated.
With the goals Garcia has, she’ll need to be. With manager Renato “Babalu” Sobral translating, Garcia spoke with Bleacher Report about where she came from, where she’s been and where she’s going.
Raised in Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil, Garcia began training Brazilian jiu-jitsu at just eight years of age. “I was always the biggest and tallest in (my) class and I got bullied. I started training jiu-jitsu, and I learned a lot of self-respect and self-confidence.”
Brazil may be home to Brazilian jiu-jitsu, but even there, it’s a sport undertaken primarily by boys and men. This was the case when Garcia started training. “I was the only (girl). My mother tried to put me in different sports and I fell in love with jiu-jitsu. I felt that jiu-jitsu was the place where I was equal to the boys...nowadays, I’m still training only with boys.”
Her MMA debut against Lei’D Tapa at Rizin FF Iza no Mai saw Garcia get knocked down early in the fight. Tapa, a professional wrestler standing 5’11, was also debuting, and for a moment, it looked like she might manage to finish Garcia.
The thought didn’t cross Garcia’s mind. I explicitly asked her if the knockdown scared her or made her think she might lose. “When I got (knocked down), I didn’t think about, ‘I’m going to lose.’ I thought, ‘I need a little bit of time so I can recover and come back up.’
“I had lots of pressure (going into the fight), and the adrenaline took over a little bit. But when I was up there, I got knocked down first, and I stood up. I let the instinct (take over) and I just needed to fight.”
She did, with wide, wild punches that finished Tapa at 2:36 of the first round. As of April 2016, Garcia has been training MMA for just seven months. This means that when she won her debut on December 31, 2015, she’d only been training for three.
At seven months in, she’s still finding her bearings. “I still feel like a baby in this sport, brand new, but I’m way more confident than the first match, with the debut pressure being over. I feel way more confident for this fight, and the next one I’ll be better, and the next one I’ll be better. I just have a lot of room to grow.”
Since her debut, Garcia has spread her training across several gyms. Her main training has been at a boxing gym—Anderson Silva’s, in fact. If she wanted to work on her striking, tapping into Silva’s expertise is a good way to go about it.
In addition to boxing, Garcia has been training wrestling with the Calvary Chapel, Brazilian jiu-jitsu with Fabricio Werdum’s instructor Rubens “Cobrinha” Charles, and MMA with Sobral, a retired Strikeforce champion and UFC veteran.
Further developing and diversifying her skill set should prove useful in this fight, as little is known about her opponent Anna Malyukova. They both have records of 1-0 on Sherdog, although a news site for the Russian city of Penza says Malyukova is a “long-time MMA champion of Russia.” The Rizin website has her at 175cm, about 5’9”—a good five inches shorter than Garcia—and she weighed in at 92kg to Garcia’s 95.
Outside of vital stats, Garcia believes Malyukova has good strategy, but she doesn’t worry much about the unknowns. “I worry more about what I’m going to do, and we have a game plan already,” she said.
“I’m not nervous, I just feel adrenaline, and this is the best part of the game...it’s what motivates me, and I’m a natural born fighter. I’m born to fight, that’s what I do, that’s what I like to do, that’s what I’ll do-forever.”
If it were up to Garcia, this fight would end via submission. When asked if she preferred any submission in particula—and she didn’t need Sobral to translate—“Armbar,” she said immediately.
I then asked about her favorite submission in the gi. With lapels, sleeves, hems, cuffs, and yards of fabric, the gi facilitates a variety of submissions that rely on it.
Garcia laughed. “Armbar!”
With her extensive competitive Brazilian jiu-jitsu background, Garcia spoke about opportunities there versus MMA. “I feel that I have almost a similar opportunity (in MMA); I think opportunities are going to come up more as I fight...and with the opportunity to compete in Rizin in Japan, the best place on the planet to compete in MMA, I feel that I’ll get a lot of attention,” she said.
But with even women’s featherweights a fairly limited pool, what sort of talent is there for Garcia to take on? Few women approach her height, and even fewer elect to fight professionally.
“I get a lot of people challenging me on the internet,” Garcia said. “It’s going to be harder to find an opponent for me, but I’m not the only one person on the planet (this size). So we don’t have many women this size, but I open a new market.”
That said, Garcia will fight at other weights, if necessary. “The boss (Nobuyuki Sakakibara) wants to watch another two fights. If I have to lose weight to compete with someone else, and it’s a medical possibility, yes, for sure, I will make all the effort to do this,” she said.
Whatever it takes. “I have a big goal. I want to be the best fighter of all time, like I was in jiu-jitsu. I set the same bar that I have in jiu-jitsu.”
Being the best seems to make dealing the vitriol the internet sends her way a little easier. From her stature and body to being stripped of her medals from the 2013 IBJJF Worlds after testing positive for a banned substance, it’s like certain factions of the internet believe they’ve found the smoking gun to justify hurling abuse at her. Never mind that the USADA concluded Garcia hadn’t acted negligently and wasn’t at fault for the positive test, and the substance doesn’t actually do much to enhance a woman’s performance.
But she’s out there, fighting, becoming the best. “I feel that hate is...everybody wants to be a fighter, everybody wants to go there and do what I do, but not many people have the courage and the guts that I have to compete. So people have to deliver the hate on the internet, behind the computer.
“You just need to be in the spotlight to be attacked.”
Garcia has been in the spotlight in one way or another for decades now and seems accustomed to the attention it brings, good and bad. If she has her way and continues rising to the top, that poise will serve her well.
It has so far; she remains loyal to and engaged with her fans. When I asked her if she had anything to add, she said, “I would like to say thanks to all my fans on social media, they follow me on my Instagram and Facebook. I go and answer as many questions as possible, so go over there and if you’re a fan, make your question, and when I have time, I will answer. Politely.”
Her manager has less capacity for diplomacy. Or maybe he’s just protective of his fighter. “For me, I will answer impolitely,” he joked.
It’s always nice to have someone in your corner, but if Garcia has established one thing, it’s that she’s excellent at fighting for herself.
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