Kade Ruotolo is inarguably one of the top grapplers on the planet but no matter how many wins or losses he amasses during his career, the 22-year-old knows he did it the right way.
In recent months top names across Brazilian jiu-jitsu have gotten rather heated when addressing performance enhancing drug use in the sport, particularly after a back-and-forth war of words between Mikey Musumeci and Gordon Ryan. For Musumeci, who recently became the first person to sign a grappling only contract with the UFC, he unleashed on the rampant use of steroids and other drugs in the sport.
Ryan eventually fired back after he was singled out because he’s spoken openly about using steroids while constantly noting that there’s nothing illegal about what he’s doing because the majority of grappling competitions don’t have rules against performance enhancing drug use.
“There’s a lot of different arguments, things you can make to justify it or whatever,” Ruotolo told MMA Fighting about steroid use in jiu-jitsu competitions. “In almost every single other sport that I know it’s not legal or any real sport it’s not legal.
“I think there’s so much that goes deeper than just the act of it. I don’t think a lot of people understand the influence their setting for the younger generations and that’s only become worse and worse and worse. I’ve seen it firsthand where you see 14 year olds, 15 year olds are taking steroids. You’re just like this is not healthy.”
Ruotolo, who is set to resume his MMA career on Thursday at ONE 171 in Qatar, has often spoken out against steroid use in grappling while holding his head up high knowing that he’s never taken any shortcuts during his own career.
He’s also taken aim at Ryan in the past for using performance enhancing drugs but Ruotolo revealed that’s actually come back to bite him.
“It’s a topic that I would talk a lot about back then, like a year or so ago, but now I’m at a point where I was almost getting backlash for talking against it in sense,” Ruotolo said. “I’m like I’m just going to take a backseat and my brother [Tye] and I, we’re going to do things the way we believe that it should be done naturally.”
When it comes to Ryan specifically, Ruotolo believes performance enhancing drugs definitely give him an advantage but he also knows that steroid abuse can absolutely wreck your body.
He looks no further than the multitude of health issues that Ryan has faced in recent years, which has kept him from competing regularly.
“Longevity aside, the reason why Gordon is only competing every two years right now or once a year or whatever it is — like right now I think he’s doing something with Mikey Musumeci are possibly going to do some sort of Ultimate Fighter type thing for jiu-jitsu possibly, I believe — and he can’t fight because of health issues,” Ruotolo said. “At the end of the day, he can never fight because of health issues.
“Then you can only get one camp every year, every two years to kind of be healthy for. I just think it’s not the way the body should be ran. He’s in his 20s, he’s the same age as Mikey Musumeci and you can kind of look at the two physical states [and judge for yourself].”
Ruotolo definitely recognizes that Ryan isn’t the only grappler using steroids because he’s seen it firsthand with some of his past opponents.
While he routinely finds ways to conquer the competition regardless of what anybody might be using, Ruotolo says it is a little discouraging to walk onto the mat knowing that he’s already at a disadvantage because he refuses to take steroids.
“To each their own. Everyone can do whatever they want,” Ruotolo said. “It’s just frustrating when I’m out there slapping hands with my opponent, I know I’m doing everything that I can do naturally and I look at this guy and they may be putting half of the work in or if it’s not even the workload, just seeing they’ve got three traps on each one of their traps and two lats and you’re just like here we go.
“I feel like that’s also how my brother’s and I style has kind of been deemed sometimes you could say scrambly or just people will say certain ways to describe our games and it’s not even so much that our game is that we’re looking for crazy scrambles and trying to just snatch stuff, people don’t really realize that every act that we’re doing is fighting around strength. Because you can’t go head to head with these guys for strength.”
Ruotolo learned to adapt his style to deal with bigger, stronger opponents but it’s not a perfect science no matter how much work he puts in the gym.
“When you’re technical and you have another technical guy and this guy takes steroids or all these different [drugs], it’s going to be that much harder to catch back up,” Ruotolo said. “Not only are you going to have to catch up by working on your technique overtime, you’re going to have to figure out how to fight around that strength.
“The only way you can fight around strength is you’ve got to be like water. That’s the way me and my brother try to operate.”
As much as he disagrees with steroid use in grappling, Ruotolo can’t control how other people conduct their lives. He can only take comfort in knowing that years from now when his career is over that he can take pride knowing that every single victory was earned.
“We know that when we get those results, we get those ‘W’s, we enjoy all of it with zero sense of like ‘I wonder if I could have done that without steroids,’” Ruotolo said. “I wonder if they ask those questions because I could never live like that.”
