Clayton Grawberger with Revelation Martial Arts has been dominating the Jiu-Jitsu scene. 

He is currently ranked on Smoothcomp as the world’s #2 athlete worldwide in most gold medals in the last 100 days, and is also holding the #2 spot for the best win/loss difference globally. 

In Canada, he is ranked #1 across all divisions. 

He says it feels amazing to see these accomplishments. 

“I put in a lot of hard work and a lot of fights, but it paid off.” 

Grawberger has been into Martial Arts since he was a little kid, he always followed it and had friends involved in it, but he didn’t start his own journey until just over a year ago at about 40 years old. 

“My kids, my twin boys, started when they were nine. It was about 14 months ago they started and talked me into doing it. I figured I was too old to get started." 

Grawberger and his twins.

About four weeks in, he decided to go all in and join his first tournament. 

His first tournament, he didn’t get as good of results as he had hoped, but ever since then he has been doing incredible. 

“I’ve been able to rack up a lot of wins and golds, and be able to represent our gym fairly well with going to Saskatchewan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Manitoba, I’ve been traveling around competing with my kids all over the place.” 

He says it’s been a pretty amazing experience, as he has a great sensei, and he loves being able to learn the sport alongside his kids and see them enjoy it so much. 

“At this age I didn’t think I’d be able to share in something like that and still be physically capable of keeping up with the kids, never mind excelling with them.” 

Grawberger entered in four different divisions. 

Adult division, weight division, and two absolute divisions.  

“(I) ended up being merged with some heavier people and so I had some pretty good challenges because when you’re going in absolute, you’re going with younger people.” 

He says when he was in Minnesota he ran into a lot of good wrestlers.  

“I had some pretty good challenges against advanced wrestlers a lot more experienced than me, and I was able to pull off some triple golds and silver and I got a quadruple gold down in Sue Falls, so those tournaments have been some pretty good highlights for me.” 

He says his best experience and best performance so far was when he went down to South Dakota and came back with four golds. 

“I made the travel with my kids and I pulled one other person from the dojo with me to come down there, and it was a good experience to walk out with those many medals.” 

Grawberger and his family

Grawberger says it feels great to go to the states and represent not only the southeast- but Manitoba and Canada as well. 

He’s gained a reputation South of the border as he has been competing in the circuits. 

“I got a circle of people when I come in with my kids and they know who we are, they know we’re from Canada, and you’re in enemy's territory a little bit because people are like, ‘we can’t let these Canadians come in and beat us!’ But there also is really good sportsmanship as well.” 

Grawberger says he has played a lot of sports in his life, and there is no sportsmanship like there is in Jiu-Jitsu. 

“We make the joke, ‘it’s funny how nice you can be to one another while you go out on the floor and try to strangle the other person.’ But it’s true. No one is trying to hurt anybody, they are just trying to compete.” 

 

With files from Dave Anthony 

 

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