HAVE you heard the one about Bradford having 13 European champions and nine British champions?

Well they do, thanks to an incredibly successful jiu-jitsu club in Horton Bank Top.

On successive weekends earlier this month, Gracie Barra Bradford sent teams to the British Open and the Junior European Championships, and came back with a huge haul of gold, silver and bronze medals.

Programme director Sam McGinty, who runs Gracie Barra with her partner Craig Tetley, explained: "We'd not competed since before lockdown.

"We ran online classes, bought in a few martial arts dummies to train with, and then when we returned properly in April, we were able to grapple in small groups of 15.

"Normally we take the team (which is mainly juniors and a few adults) to lots of events throughout the year, but there are four big ones, the Junior World, European and National Championships and the British Open.

"We're lucky in that all of them take place in the UK, and there's even an International Championship being added to the calendar for 2022.

"The British Open earlier this month in Loughborough was our first competition in so long that we weren't sure how everyone would do after their time away.

"Had they kept up with their training at home and did they have brothers or sisters to train with? Things like that.

"But we racked up gold after gold, as well as several silvers and bronzes, and ended up with nine British champions, including three adults."

It got better for the Horton Bank Top-based club too, with McGinty saying: "After the British, we were in Wolverhampton a week later for the Junior European Championships.

"We went down with a slightly bigger team than we'd had for the British, and came back with 13 golds, as well as plenty of silvers and bronzes.

"At the British our youngest competitor was only seven, with our juniors going up to the age of 15, and I think at the Europeans our youngest was only six.

"They were the only two of the four big ones this year, as the World and National are next February and March I believe, just because they couldn't squeeze them all in with us being disrupted by Covid in 2021."

Gracie Barra Bradford has come a long way in a short space of time, with McGinty saying: "There are over 700 Gracie Barras around the world.

"My partner Craig got his black belt under world-renowned jiu-jitsu star Braulio Estima, who is from Brazil but runs the Gracie Barra in Birmingham.

"He had to give Craig permission to set one up in Bradford, which he was able to do once he'd got his brown belt.

"In jiu-jitsu, you only need to be proficient at blue or purple belt to set one up.

"We only started running classes, which were initially for kids, in November 2013, and we started doing competitions after a couple of years."