Fight Sports leads. Five anti-doping violations: Cyborg, Porfirio, De Sousa, Rocha, and most recently Mica Galvão. Alliance sits second with four (Nogueira, Tayane Porfirio, Andrew, Gabi Garcia). Gracie Barra is third with three (Pena twice, Estima). Atos is fourth with two (Kaynan Duarte, Jonnatas Gracie). Fourteen violations, four teams, one sport that still insists this is mostly a supplement problem.

BJJEE published the running tally this week. They did the thing IBJJF has declined to do for a decade: listed the names and added them up. It is a rough piece of work. About 1,800 words, a paragraph of context per team, the standard disclaimer at the bottom that "elite teams get tested more than everyone else, so the count may be skewed." That disclaimer is supposed to soften things. It does the opposite. It becomes the sharpest line in the whole article, because after six years of public scandals and a half-dozen bombshell interviews and a brief window where #bjj_steroids trended on Instagram at Worlds, the sport still has no central testing body, no published anti-doping database, and not a single team voluntarily disclosing internal results. The disclaimer is a confession about the sport dressed up as an asterisk.

You know the scene. Worlds 2025, #bjj_steroids trending for seventy-two hours because four athletes got popped inside the same news cycle. Hot takes everywhere. Coaches posting grave-faced statements to Instagram stories. Then Monday arrives and everyone agrees it is mostly contaminated pre-workout, and the community files the issue back under "lifestyle supplements" and goes back to arguing about whether knee reaping should be legal. Six months later the dashboard still reads: zero new testing bodies created, zero new publication standards, zero teams disclosing their own results. The next quarter's violations show up and everyone is surprised again, like a man who is shocked, every morning, that the sun has come up.

The BJJEE piece is polite about it. It lists the names. It notes that Fight Sports "has had multiple high-profile cases" without saying the thing a functional anti-doping system would say, which is this: a single team with five independent positives is either running a program or tolerating a culture. Those are the only two options. You do not land five times by accident unless the roster is uniquely unlucky, and these rosters are not uniquely unlucky. They are uniquely talented, which means they get tested more, which brings us back to the disclaimer that keeps doing damage to its own argument.

Here is the part nobody wants to touch. None of these teams publish internal testing results. Not one. Every team PR response, every single time, is some version of "we take this seriously and the athlete is handling it on their own." That is a fine crisis-comms template. It is not a testing protocol. In BJJ, the crisis comms IS the testing protocol. There is no second layer. The athlete gets popped, the team issues the line, the athlete sits out, and ten months later they are competing again and their Instagram is back to "grateful for the journey."

IBJJF's response to the BJJEE tally is IBJJF's response to everything. Three sentences acknowledging that anti-doping is important, a reference to WADA, a reminder that competitors sign a form. Those three sentences appeared after the 2023 tally. They appeared again after the 2024 tally. They have appeared a third time now in 2026, with only the date changed. In three years, the violation count roughly doubled. In three years, the official statement was copy-pasted. If the numbers are doubling while the response stays identical, you are not watching an anti-doping program. You are watching a ceremony.

The defense that always gets trotted out is that BJJ is a grassroots sport with thin margins and no central body that could afford serious testing. Fine. Then say that on the record. Issue a statement that reads: "We cannot catch 95% of dopers, we know this, and our published rankings should be interpreted accordingly." It would be honest. It would also collapse the entire commercial value of a world title, which is why no federation will ever write it. Better to stay quiet, keep collecting entry fees, and let the athletes who do get caught absorb the reputational damage alone.

Meanwhile, every gym owner in the country is fielding the same question from the same parent at signup: "Is my kid going to be around this?" The honest answer, something like "our team's competitive wing probably is not a factor for your twelve-year-old white belt, but if your kid gets good enough to be scouted, then yes," is not a thing a gym owner can say out loud. So the pamphlet version wins. The parent walks out vaguely reassured, a little confused about why the brochure was so eager to talk about discipline and so quiet about pharmacology.

The scoreboard is the argument. That is the line from the BJJEE piece that sticks. Fourteen public violations across four teams is a verdict on governance, not on athletes. The federation has decided the best way to handle doping is to wait for WADA to catch people on behalf of a sport that refuses to catch anyone itself. The teams keep their branding. The federation keeps its entry fees. The community keeps its "look, it is mostly lifestyle supplements" shrug. And the next time a Fight Sports athlete gets popped, everyone will agree it is a terrible outcome for the individual and a challenge for the sport, which is the exact language that was used the previous four times a Fight Sports athlete got popped.

You could build a working anti-doping program in twelve months. It would need a budget, a published standard, a public registry of violations, and a federation willing to be the bad guy when a top-ten pay-per-view name gets flagged six weeks before a superfight. Nobody wants to pay for any of that. More importantly, nobody wants to be the person who stops a match from happening. So the scoreboard will keep updating itself, one medal at a time, and the disclaimer at the bottom will keep getting sharper every year.

Fight Sports five. Alliance four. Gracie Barra three. Atos two. Tune in next quarter for the refresh.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

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