Without the Gracies, No Modern Roda

WHY THIS ARTICLE

Disciplines tell their victories and erase their defeats. Yet the defeats of 1928–1953 are explained neither by the weakness of the men nor by chance — but by the incompatibility of two logics of play. And without them, today's folkloric, musical, circular capoeira would not exist.

A giant of one metre fifty-five

São Paulo, 19 October 1928. A jiu-jitsu champion of 1.55 metres and 66 kilos, Géo Omori, has just beaten the capoeira Oswaldo Caetano Vasques. The news makes noise: since the late 1920s, capoeiras and jiu-jitsu teachers have been disputing, in the rings and in the newspapers, the title of Brazil's most effective method of self-defence.

A recognised mestre then takes up the challenge. Argemiro Feitósa, in whom the Paulista press places all its confidence, wants “to wash away the affront done to the national capoeiragem”. His conditions deserve attention. To fight outside the ring — on a football pitch or an open space, echoing the proposals Burlamaqui publishes that same year. Without the kimono. And without pay: “Feitósa merely wants to demonstrate the superiority of the national weapon so discredited by Caetano Vasques.”

To refuse the ring, the kimono and the money is to refuse to fight in the adversary's grammar. The capoeiras had understood something history was about to confirm. They were not given the chance. Feitósa is beaten on 13 January 1929. The media sanction falls at once: “After the successive defeats, the journalists abandoned the capoeiras. The national fighting art disappeared from public space.”

In Rio, the scenario repeats — with names that will mark the century. The Gracie family: Carlos, Hélio, George, trained in the school of the Japanese Sakuzo Miura and his peers. The direct lineage of Cyriaco's adversary. They “crush the Bahian and Carioca capoeiras”. The press announces “the entry into the lists of the best capoeira in Brazil” to “save the national game”. Nothing works. In a quarter of a century, the national fighting art loses, ring after ring, the battle of effectiveness it had itself begun.

Why they lost

The temptation is great to explain these defeats by the men. It does not survive analysis. It was not the capoeiras who were weak. It was the logics that were incompatible.

By “internal logic” is meant what the structure of a game obliges and permits its players to do — the set of constraints and possibilities its rules inscribe in bodies. Now, the two logics in presence had almost nothing in common.

Jiu-jitsu was a global method: physical preparation, diet, techniques catalogued and systematised. A complete apparatus for producing the fighter. Capoeiragem had just come off the streets. Its internal logic — the simulacrum, the near-touch, the game — was not designed for ground immobilisation and joint locks. Two logics of play confronted each other. In a ring, under the ring's rules, jiu-jitsu's nearly always won.

The conditions posed by Feitósa — no ring, no kimono — show that the capoeiras perceived this asymmetry. They asked, without ever obtaining it, that the fight be played in their grammar rather than the adversary's.

What defeat manufactured

Here is the reversal the official narratives never tell: the defeats did not kill capoeira. They transformed it.

The movement is legible first in Bahia, where the Carioca sporting model had been exported. Mestre Bimba organises bouts between his school and other capoeiras; his unchallenged dominance obliges the latter to abandon the championships and build their own competitions on other criteria. A schism appears between “traditionals” and “moderns”.

Then the movement turns against its promoters. At the end of the 1940s, Bimba and his pupils face the Cariocas in the very heart of the capital — and “after suffering stinging defeats”, abandon sporting competition to fall back on the “traditional” capoeira they had until then decried.

The last act plays out at mid-century. Defeats against jiu-jitsu, the reverses of Bimba's pupils, the rise of Northeastern folkloric capoeira in the capital: everything converges to marginalise ring capoeiragem, until its disappearance in the mid-1950s — sealed by “the first vale-tudo in history”, where capoeiragem was “killed anew”. The combative version of the game dies a second time. No longer under the blows of the police — under those of sporting competition.

The paradoxical inheritance

It is from this retreat — and not from any peaceful continuity with a golden age — that contemporary capoeira was born: folkloric, musical, circular, spectacular. The official narratives erase the defeats as so many shameful episodes. The sources make them the very engine of the invention.

One must therefore dare the formula, however contrary to the pious images: without the Gracies, no modern roda.

SOURCES

Press archives, National Library of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) and Paulista press: “Uma exhibição de capoeiragem na Guarda Civica”, Diario Nacional, São Paulo, 6 Dec. 1928; Diario Nacional, 21 Oct. 1928; “Géo Omori vae lutar no Rio”, Diario Nacional, 18 Jan. 1929; “As lutas no Circo Queirolo”, Diario Nacional, 26 Sept. 1928. — Malo, O., La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020, Part II, ch. A and D.

IN THE CORPUS

→ They Modernised Capoeira, Lost, Then Embraced the Tradition They Had Mocked

→ Winning by Falling, Touching Without Touching

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. Without the Gracies, No Modern Roda. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 05. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/without-the-gracies-no-modern-roda. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.