Kano-Maeda-Carlos-Helio-Rickson-Marcelo Behring-Max Trombini-Jon Kelly- me. Not obnoxious, but a lot of links in the chain.

Kanō Jigorō > Tomita Tsunejirō > Mitsuyo Maeda > Carlos Gracie Sr. > Helio Gracie > Carlos Gracie jr.> Roger Gracie > Nicholas Hunter Brooks (> Holger Jonny Weber) > Sebastian Ellinghaus

So what happens if you’ve been training under someone but someone else promoted you. And what if you’ve been promoted by and training with multiple people along the way. Lineage concept does not seem capable of containing this sort of data structure 😄

So what happens if you’ve been training under someone but someone else promoted you. And what if you’ve been promoted by and training with multiple people along the way. Lineage concept does not seem capable of containing this sort of data structure 😄

It is 11 when You accept it all started with Kano Jigoro and not Maeda who was picked by Kano to spread Judo over the world. 🫣 fun fact by the way: My verifiable Judo-lineage is even shorter than my BJJ-lineage. There were only 3 japanese guys (incl. Kano himself), a belgian Judoka and my teacher before me.💁🏻‍♂️ But in Judo nobody is interested in stuff like lineages.😆

I think because Judo has been regulated longer, with regional and national grading boards, that any kind of “lineage” is often irrelevant.

I agree. Coming from a strong pre-Olympic judo background, I find this whole 'lineage' thing truly bizarre. It reminds me of ancestor worship as is practiced in the indigenous south Pacific islands and northwest indigenous American cultures.

I agree. Coming from a strong pre-Olympic judo background, I find this whole 'lineage' thing truly bizarre. It reminds me of ancestor worship as is practiced in the indigenous south Pacific islands and northwest indigenous American cultures.

Lineage is more looked at as who you received your knowledge from and are they a trusted source to bestow such. It is the same in Academia. Your highest degree earned is looked at closely and to which school conferred that degree and whether not you have the prerequisites to teach, do the job, or act as an expert in that chosen field.

Out of interest, who do you think has the longest lineage on Beltchecker? How many generations deep, with Maeda as number one? And what is the longest lineage on Beltchecker where it is easy to check all steps going back to at least the well known names of the 90:s? Not everyone agrees on from what degree (0:th-3:rd?) you should be able to promote others to BB. With low degree BB:s doing the deed, there can be a lot of new 'lineage generations' in a short time period, but that can also be the result of honoring your everyday instructor by adding him/her to the lineage even if the BB was formally from someone else. When I started training (mid 90:s), reviewing lineages was very easy. Basically all instructors sought out by gringos could tell their lineage in seconds, with very few levels involved. Now, I sometimes see really long ones with a lot of names I've never heard of and don't even find good info on through google. Not many years from now (if not already), I see a lot of BB claims will be totally unverifiable, when it comes to legitimacy through lineage. Perhaps, it's unavoidable that it will all just go back to being jiu-jitsu with some old traditionalists revering a few lineages with verifiability preserved over the years but that no young people will really care about, as everything in the game could just as well had been tested out and developed yesterday more or less from scratch by an AI (that could be fed with your own exact body type etc), with the same resulting style :-)