Legendary BJJ competitor Marcelo Garcia opened up about his year-long battle with stomach cancer.
This Friday, January 24, BJJ icon Marcelo Garcia will make his celebrated return to competition when he takes on Masakazu Imanari in a 10-minute submission grappling bout at ONE 170.
After nearly 14 full years on the sidelines, the Brazilian’s return has naturally drawn the attention of grappling fans around the world. Just two years ago, though, those same fans were worried if Garcia would survive a stomach cancer diagnosis, much less compete again.
In early 2023, Garcia – a four-time ADCC world champion and five-time IBJJF world champion widely recognized as the sport’s greatest competitor ever – announced that he had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. He would spend the next year away from the mats, unable to train or teach as he underwent the grueling treatment and recovery process.
“I was like, alright, so now this is a whole new thing that I have no idea what’s gonna happen,” Garcia said in an interview with ONE Championship. “And I was just trying to figure it out. Thank God, things started going more in my way to help me, and we found the cancer early.”
Garcia is renowned for his love of jiu-jitsu, so his time away from training was, understandably, difficult.
Looking back on his year of treatment, he said that he did everything in his power to simply help the time pass quickly:
“I had a whole year, pretty crazy. I was playing a lot of video games that year because I just needed the time to pass. I didn’t care if I was wasting time or not. I just felt like I needed to let the time pass. The time just has to pass quickly. I needed to go through this, and I just wanna be able to just pass through the time fast. That’s why I was talking about video games. And I did that, but at the same time, I just couldn’t wait to go back to training. And I feel like now, finally, everything’s happening.”
Indeed, Garcia recalls spending much of 2023 on his couch playing video games. However, he also recalls the arduous process of chemotherapy treatments and surgery to remove the tumor.
“It was not fun at all to go through the treatment,” he said. “I ended up doing, like, eight sessions of chemotherapy. The first four were really rough. The last four, not terrible. And in between those eight chemotherapy sessions, I ended up having a big surgery. That changed a lot of the dynamic inside my body, my stomach, my esophagus.”
By late 2023, Garcia was back on the mats at his newly opened academy in Hawaii.
Throughout his battle with cancer, he often found himself thinking more about his family – his wife Tatiana and their two children – than himself:
“It wasn’t a great thing fighting for my life, you know. And when I say my life, I’m not just talking about myself. I’m talking about, like, the life of my kids’ father. You know what I mean? I have to be their father. I need to stay here longer, and I need to try to give them the best chance to grow up like a good person.”
When he was finally cleared to train again, Garcia once again had his children at the forefront of his mind.
“I can know what makes me feel like the best in my life – if I can give a better childhood to my family. That’s my biggest wish. So when I trained again, I felt like, okay, now I can give a better life for my family because now I can work every day. Now I can do that thing that’s probably the best thing that I know how to do… So when I was able to go back on the mat, I was just not thinking about myself, but I was just so happy to be able to make a living again with jiu-jitsu, because it was hard to not be able to really work. That was really, like, what beat me up every day.”
How to watch: Marcelo Garcia vs. Masakazu Imanari takes place at ONE 170 on Friday, January 24 and will air live on ONE’s YouTube channel beginning at 6:30 AM CT.
