Yuri Simões "Novinho"

Yuri Costa Simões Martins da Silva was born June 18, 1990, in Rio de Janeiro, and began training jiu-jitsu at age nine after his father, himself a practitioner, brought him into the sport. It was a second coach, Maurício "Behring," who Simões has credited with pushing him specifically toward competition and helping him find what became his defining trait on the mat: a relentless, high-pace style built around taking the back and finishing from dominant positions rather than playing a patient, points-focused game.

Simões climbed the colored-belt ranks as a serious title threat well before reaching black belt, winning the IBJJF World Championship as a purple belt in 2009 and again as a brown belt in 2011. That brown-belt run led his coach at the time, Ricardo Vieira, to award him his black belt in December 2011 — a promotion that came directly on the back of major tournament success rather than years of quiet mat time, similar to the trajectory of several of the sport's most explosive modern competitors.

As a black belt, Simões quickly became one of the most feared no-gi specialists in the world. He won IBJJF No-Gi World Championship double gold — both his weight class and the absolute division — in 2014 and again in 2016, a feat that makes him the only competitor in IBJJF history to win the black belt no-gi absolute world title twice. His signature achievement, though, came at the Abu Dhabi Combat Club World Championship, where he built one of the more complete résumés in the event's history: gold in the 88kg division in 2015 (famously defeating Keenan Cornelius), gold in the 99kg division in 2017, and gold in the absolute division in 2022, where he ran through a murderers' row that included Lachlan Giles, Nick Rodriguez, Roberto "Cyborg" Abreu, and Nicholas Meregali in succession to close out the tournament. Winning ADCC gold across three separate divisions — two different weight classes plus the openweight bracket — is a distinction only a small handful of grapplers in the event's history can claim.

Since 2013, Simões has been based at the Caio Terra Association (CTA) headquarters in San Jose, California, training and coaching alongside 11-time world champion Caio Terra. He became CTA's head no-gi instructor in 2015 and has spent the years since mentoring the academy's competition team and its wider network of international affiliates, giving him a teaching legacy that runs parallel to his own competitive one.

Simões has also tested himself in mixed martial arts, signing with ONE Championship and making his promotional debut in 2020 before a second appearance in 2022; both bouts ended in decision losses to more experienced strikers. Rather than abandon the sport, he returned to what he does best — grappling — and kept collecting ADCC and IBJJF hardware through the early 2020s, before circling back to MMA on the regional circuit in 2026 and picking up his first professional win at EMC Talents. That willingness to keep testing himself outside his comfort zone, even after establishing himself as one of the greatest no-gi absolute competitors of all time, is very much in keeping with the aggressive, finish-first approach that built his reputation in the first place.

Relentless, high-pace back-taker and finisher who competes across weight classes into the absolute division