The win did not come easily. Shortly after touching down in Toronto following the event, Marella gave fans an honest look at what the weekend had cost him physically.

“Just landed back in Toronto. It was a hard-f0ught weekend to say the least,” he wrote.

He did not sugarcoat the aftermath either. “My jaw is not perfectly aligned. My back is a bit f***ed up, & my feet are bleeding, I’m afraid to take off my shoes,” Marella said, describing a body clearly worn down by a tournament’s worth of matches against opponents who had every size advantage on paper.

But for Marella, the result made every bit of it worth enduring.

“We got gold though so that’s a sweet feeling,” he said, capping off his update with a note of gratitude for those who had followed along. “Thank you to everybody is all I can say at this time.”

Marella’s rise to purple belt came after a breakthrough run at the IBJJF Masters World Championships. After a disappointing showing the previous year, he returned to the tournament as a blue belt and dominated his division, winning gold before entering the open division and claiming a second gold against competitors from different weight classes.

His double-gold performance earned him a promotion to purple belt on the podium, following the common practice of promoting world champions after they win at their current belt level.

•  
  

  “Most people that do this that I see suck at it,” he said. “They suck at it. I think for me it’s perfect because I understand what I want to achieve and I can design and I can change the design. But people are just copying it or doing positional rounds. They don’t really understand what they do.”

  For Murovanni, the test of whether the method is being applied correctly is simple: results.

  “In the end the question is, is it helping your athletes and your students? If yes it’s correct, but from my understanding what I see, most people don’t do it properly. It’s not helping people.”

  He predicted the trend would spread through the sport regardless.

  “I think everybody will jump on it but not everybody will understand what it is,” he said.

  Murovanni expects the enthusiasm to eventually cool before the coaches who genuinely understand the underlying principles remain.

• Chimpanzees have never seemed like a threat worth thinking about, but Cole Johnson has spent the past week convincing the internet otherwise. The New Zealand-based welterweight, who trains out of City Kickboxing, took to social media to argue that a wild chimp would not stand a chance against someone with his grappling background, and he has since booked what he says will be a broadcasted encounter with one this Friday.

  The claim has generated millions of views, plenty of doubt, and reportedly some real financial offers, but Johnson is far from the first person to size himself up against an animal that could tear him apart.

  Johnson’s case rests on a number he insists gets thrown around without any scrutiny. The idea that a chimpanzee is six times stronger than an average man gets repeated constantly, and he does not buy it.

  “Oh, it’s six times stronger than a human. First of all, no it’s not. You’re hearing s**t from the Internet and regurgitating it,” he said. His own estimate puts a chimp’s strength closer to double that of an average person, and he places himself in the same bracket thanks to a lifetime spent wrestling.

  “A chimpanzee is two times the strength of the average human. You know who else is two times the strength of an average human? Me,” he said, adding, “I’ve been grappling and wrestling my whole life.”

  He also sized up the animal itself, describing it as roughly 4 feet tall and 130 lbs (59 kg), and admitted the confrontation would not be tidy no matter how it went. “But it’s going to maul your face. I don’t f**king care if this thing’s on my face. Right to the concrete,” he said.

  What makes the story stranger is that Johnson never expected any of this to go beyond a joke. “I mean, even myself, I didn’t know. So I just made that original video as a joke,” he said. He still stands by the underlying belief, though. “Do I think I could beat a chimp in a brawl? Yeah, I do, but I never thought I was gonna do it, right?”

  That changed once the video started climbing toward five million views and his inbox filled with people offering real money. “And then all of a sudden, all these people in my DMs will give you 500k,” he said.

  A first deal collapsed when the person behind it turned out to be untrustworthy, in Johnson’s telling. “I took this guy’s offer to go and compete against this chimpanzee in a country that I can’t speak about, but he ended up being a bullsh**ter,” he said.

  A second, larger offer followed, tied to an event he says is coming within a month, though he would not name a date or location. “And then I got an offer for even more money in a month that I can’t even disclose,” he said.

  The animal he would be facing is not a docile one, according to Johnson. He described a male chimp with a reported history of aggression toward people, and organizers apparently have no plans to blunt its natural weapons.

  “So this is a male chimp that did a couple people and these guys are like, all right, you might as well do this. We’ll give you some money,” he said. Asked about safety measures, he confirmed there would not be many. “There’s no, they’re not going to cut the teeth. They’re not going to cut the claws or anything like that,” he said.

  A tranquilizer team is expected to be stationed nearby in case things go badly, with the whole thing set to unfold outdoors on grass inside a large enclosure. Johnson framed his goal as a personal test rather than anything more severe.

  “So I want to go against this wild animal and test myself against it. I don’t want to k*ll this wild animal and I don’t want to di3,” he said. He described the plan as open-ended. “We’re going to brawl until I see obviously I’m winning. All right. If it’s k*lling me, it’s going to get tranquilized,” he said, while acknowledging the obvious downside.

  “Obviously, a possibility. I’m not saying, you know, I’m going to come out of this thing unscathed,” he said, adding that he has thought the whole thing through. “I’ve weighed out the risks. I’ve weighed out the benefits. I got a couple of game plans here.”

  Long before crypto promoters started dangling six-figure offers for animal matchups, Khabib Nurmagomedov was already living a version of this story as a child. The undefeated former UFC lightweight champion grew up in Dagestan under the guidance of his father Abdulmanap, who became one of the sport’s most respected trainers and later produced champions like Islam Makhachev.

  Home footage from September 1997, taken weeks before Khabib turned nine, shows him already grappling with bears, a detail that still circulates online whenever people want a reminder of where his toughness originated.

  He is not the only fighter from that region willing to test himself against a bear. Boxer Arslanbek Makhmudov, who has shared a ring with the calibre of Tyson Fury and built a 21-3 record with 19 knockouts, filmed his own version of the exercise as an adult against a full grown animal.

  Rather than simply surviving the encounter, Makhmudov managed to work his way around to the bear’s back, proof that his grappling instincts translate outside the ring just as well as inside it.

   

  Not every entry on this list involved someone seeking the challenge out. In October 2023, martial arts instructor Mick Moloney was walking his dog near the water in Mildura, Australia, when the calm afternoon turned into an emergency.

  A kangaroo had gotten his dog Hatchi into a headlock and was holding on tight enough to threaten its breathing. Moloney filmed himself charging into the river to intervene, and the footage captured him warning the animal in blunt terms as he approached. He can be heard telling it he was going to punch its head in, right before the kangaroo swatted his phone out of his hand and into the water.

  Somehow he managed to retrieve both the phone and his dog, walking away with only minor scratches. He later joked that the kangaroo looked like it had just been released from custody given how solidly built it was.

   

  The final example barely qualifies as an athlete’s story at all, which is part of what makes it remarkable. Travis Kauffman was just a 31-year-old jogger in Fort Collins, Colorado, with no background in jiu-jitsu and no real history of following combat sports, when a mountain lion attacked him mid-run.

  Instinct did what training normally does, and Kauffman worked the animal off of him using rudimentary grappling before choking it into submission. At 5’10 and 150 lbs, he was hardly built for the encounter, and he left with 28 stitches and injuries serious enough to remind everyone how close it came to going the other way.

  Whether Friday actually produces a broadcast bout between a welterweight and a chimpanzee remains to be seen, and plenty of observers suspect the whole thing evaporates before it happens.

  But if history is any indication, Johnson would not be the first man to walk away from an animal encounter with a story worth telling, nor would he be the first to seriously overestimate how it might go