In 2025 so far across 48 open tournaments, the IBJJF has given out approximately 25,000 (9,300 gold, 7,357 silver and 8,324 bronze) medals to juvenile, adult, and masters competitors, which surely you have noticed all over Facebook and Instagram. What you might not see though, is that more than a third (8,312) of those medals were given when the participant either had no matches (default gold) or lost their only match (default silver or bronze).

Now, I’m not here to de-merit the guy who posts about getting silver in a two-man division. This is just a data project illustrating where all the medals are going.

There are a lot of default medals in the masters divisions.

74 percent of all default medals were awarded in the masters categories, where divisions tend to be smaller.

More than a quarter of all masters division gold medals were single person divisions or divisions where two competitors signed up but only one showed up. 39 percent of masters silver medals were awarded for losing one match, and half of all masters bronze medals were awarded for losing one match.

By sheer numbers, black belts are picking up the most default medals.

One way of looking at the data is by raw numbers, although this might also approximate division sizes. There simply are not that many masters 4, 5 or 6 female athletes, so they naturally didn’t collect as many default medals. Generally, there is a tendency of more default golds in the black belt divisions, where there are usually also more athletes.

Female athletes are getting more default golds.

Another way to slice the data is by percentage. So, of all the gold medals earned this year so far, what percentage of them were snagged without a match taking place? Women in almost every category were more likely to stay in single athlete divisions or show up to a two person division where the other athlete no-showed.

There are just a lot of medals out there.

For a little perspective, every IBJJF tournament offers registration across 95 adult divisions and 665 masters divisions. You can do this math on your own — 9 and 10 weight divisions for female and male athletes (including open class) x 7 age divisions (adult, masters 1-7) x 5 belt color levels (white through black). Not every division has participants, but that’s a maximum of 760 divisions x 4 medals per division, or up to 3040 medals per tournament.

In reality, a major tournament like the IBJJF Europeans handed out around 2,000 medals. A regular IBJJF open tournament (Atlanta Winter, Virginia Summer, etc) might hand out on average around 500 medals.

In any given open, we’re looking at around an average of 50 default gold medals, and another 130 silver and bronze medals that were won without winning a match.

Why would anyone collect a default gold medal anyway?

There are a couple logistical reasons someone might show up for their free medal.

• In the colored belts, being on the podium qualifies you for open class, where you can get more matches.

• A gold medal earns your 27 points for your weight division and 40.5 points for your overall IBJJF ranking, which affects your seeding at future tournaments.

• At adult black belt, you need those points to qualify for Pans and Worlds

That being said, the IBJJF offers a full refund if you’re alone in your division by check day, so you have to do the personal math if the above reasons are worth your 130-170 USD registration fee. Plus, Instagram clout!

If you want to earn gold by winning, you’ll probably have to win two matches.

When we take a look at the distribution of gold medals this year, most of them were won after one or two matches. In bigger divisions at open tournaments, some will require three wins (up to 8 people in the bracket) but rarely more than that.

A lot more people sign up for grand slam tournaments, and a big one like Pans might be the first time a competitor has to shift from winning two matches to winning three or four matches to win. Adult male colored belt divisions might have to win up to six matches for gold, and many of the masters male black belt divisions have to win up to five. One lucky guy in adult male blue feather fought a record (this year) of seven matches in his division to win gold at Europeans.

This might have implications on how you train for a major tournament. Even if an athlete can win multiple opens taking out one or two opponents at a time, they’ll need double the mental and physical grit to do it against three to five opponents on the same day at a major.

About the data

Thanks to Will Weisser and IBJJF Elo Rankings for providing the match data for this project. IBJJFRankings.com ranks competitors and provides a comprehensive database of matches in events run by the International Braziliation Jiu-Jitsu Federation. It is an independent site and are not affiliated with the IBJJF.

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These articles take me an average of 10 to 12 hours to analyze data, make charts, and write. If you would like to support me, please check out my jiujitsu sticker shop.

There was something about Houston Landing that never quite made sense.

It was a large digital startup in a city already served by the Houston Chronicle, whose corporate owner, Hearst, enjoys a reputation for strong journalism. It attracted a stunning amount of philanthropic funding — $20 million — before its launch two years ago, and somehow managed to burn through much of it. It was beset by tumult after its second CEO, veteran journalist Peter Bhatia, fired the Landing’s editor-in-chief, its top investigative reporter and, later, another top editor for reasons that have never been fully explained.

And on Tuesday, the Landing reached the end of the line, announcing that it would close because, despite “significant seed funding, it has been unable to build additional revenue streams to support ongoing operations.” The site will shut down in May, and 43 employees will lose their jobs.

Bhatia agreed to come on our “What Works” podcast last June after he emailed me to complain about something I’d written. My co-host, Ellen Clegg, and I found him to be charming, as candid as he could be when talking about internal personnel matters, and dedicated to creating a first-rate news outlet.

When I asked him about competing with the Chronicle, he emphasized that he didn’t see that as the Landing’s mission.

“There is so much opportunity to do journalism here,” he said. “And the people who founded Houston Landing and who ultimately recruited me here wanted more journalism for this vast community. They wanted journalism that was hard-hitting and performed traditional watchdog and accountability roles, but also to create a new kind of journalism, if you will, that is accessible to traditionally undercovered communities, which make up such a huge percentage of the population here.”

As for the firings of editor-in-chief Mizanur Rahman, investigative reporter Alex Stuckey and editor John Tedesco, Bhatia said: “I came in here after things were established and in place, and I gave things a year to develop and go in the right direction. I have nothing but respect for the people that you mentioned. They are good human beings and fantastic journalists, but we were on a path that was not sustainable, and as the leader, I felt I had to make changes in order to get us in a position to be successful for the long term.”

In any case, the people Bhatia brought in, editor-in-chief Manny García and managing editor Angel Rodriguez, are well-regarded journalists. Unfortunately, they’re also now out of work.

Columbia Journalism Review editor Sewell Chan, who had an opportunity to watch Houston Landing up close during his own stint as editor of The Texas Tribune, has written a nuanced and perceptive take on what went wrong. “In hindsight, money was both a blessing and a curse for the Landing,” Chan writes, observing that the leadership team may have been tempted by that early bonanza to spend beyond its means.

“The Landing also suffered from a lack of focus,” Chan adds, explaining that it was never clear whether its mission was to cover the city or the broader region; whether it saw itself as a traditional news outlet holding the powerful to account or if, instead, it sought to empower the community by providing them with the tools to be their own storytellers, like Documenters or Outlier. Chan also delivers this verdict on Bhatia:

I’ve known Bhatia for close to thirty years. The son of an Indian father, he has been a pioneering Asian American newsroom leader and has the utmost integrity. However, Bhatia had not run a digital-only operation, hadn’t worked extensively in nonprofit fundraising, and didn’t know Houston well.

Bhatia, in his farewell message, writes:

We are immensely proud of the work we’ve done and the impact we’ve made. Houston Landing has shown what’s possible when a news team commits itself to truth and transparency. Our stories highlighted voices that too often go unheard, sparked conversations that matter and helped inspire positive change throughout the city we love.

It’s a shame. Houston may not have been a news desert before the Landing landed, but more coverage is always better, and the focus on underrepresented communities that Bhatia talked about with Ellen and me will not be easy to replace.

It’s important, too, to recognize that what happened at the Landing says little about the nonprofit news movement in general. Chan quotes Michael Ouimette, chief investment officer of the American Journalism Project (one of the Landing’s funders), as saying that the closing is “not part of a broader trend,” and that nonprofit local news outlets remain on a growth trajectory.

Indeed, many of the nonprofits that Ellen and I track have proved to be remarkably resilient, with a few about to embark on their third decade. Unfortunately, Houston Landing will not join that charmed circle, and will instead close just a little more than two years after it was launched amid a wave of optimism.

"It's impossible to kill a media brand," Jim Spanfeller told me on my first day working for him, as we sat in his corner office. He had just bought the business news organization, Quartz, that I had spent the past decade building and, most recently, trying desperately to save from oblivion. So I was inclined to believe him.

But I knew it wasn't true. Jim and his private-equity-backed digital-media conglomerate G/O Media had already destroyed several of their properties, some all at once (Deadspin), most of the others by sapping resources, antagonizing their staff, and undermining the editorial visions that once made them great (Jezebel, The Root). It would take him three years to do the same to Quartz.

The end came on Friday, when G/O fired the few remaining writers at Quartz and sold the carcass to a Canadian firm that appears mostly interested in the email list. I thought back to Jim's comment. His cynical view of digital media was good neither for journalism nor business, but maybe Jim was right about that one thing. What is Quartz now if not a "media brand" that refuses to die?

§

We launched Quartz in 2012 with prestigious editorial hires, a slick new website, bold pronouncements about the future of media, and a splashy profile in The New York Times in which we likened ourselves to a "pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy." It sure felt that way. From a spare SoHo loft, and then increasingly fancier offices, we set out to be compelling, entertaining, serious, and excellent all at the same time. Everything was up for reinvention, from the structure of our stories to the design of our ads to the need for a traditional homepage. We believed that a news organization should stand for something, which in our case was globalism. Most of all, we put a strong emphasis on quality at a time when online journalism was still considered inferior to print publications that happened to have websites.

I think, in all those respects, we succeeded. Nothing about what ultimately transpired makes me regret the choices we made or the fun that we had. Quartz produced a lot of great journalism, served our readers well, and widely influenced the rest of our industry. If that's all Quartz was in the end, I'll take it.

Still, we also hoped to endure on the scale of centuries, just like rival news organizations — in particular, The Financial Times, The Economist, and The Wall Street Journal — that we viewed as our Goliaths. For a stretch in the middle there, it even seemed possible. But Quartz never made money. We grew, between 2012 and 2018, to nearly 250 employees and $35 million in annual revenue. The dismal economics of digital media meant losing more than $40 million over that stretch just to grow unsustainably large. A trade publication, which once called Quartz "the very model a modern publisher," started literally portraying us as pushing a boulder up a hill. Someone on our staff printed out the illustration and stuck it to a wall in our office, where it remained until the end.

§

Twenty-eighteen would prove to be the peak of the endeavor and, not incidentally, the year our original owner, David Bradley, decided to sell. Quartz had attracted takeover interest over the years from major media companies like IAC and The New York Times and even, to our astonishment, the luxury fashion house LVMH. Their interest ultimately fizzled. It was a small Japanese financial data firm, Uzabase, that made the highest and final bid, at $86 million.

As business journalists, we of course recognized that Quartz was fundamentally a financial asset subject to the whims of market forces beyond our control. I may have known it intellectually, but still viewed Quartz as a movement out to prove something more noble. So when Uzabase gave up on us two years later, at the height of the pandemic, I quixotically decided to buy the company myself. The price tag was next-to-nothing but also required financing the buyout and taking on the risk of surviving, for the first time, as an independent company.

The two years we spent on our own was the most challenging stretch of my tenure at Quartz. I started having panic attacks. One morning shortly after the buyout, I fainted and fell limp to the floor of my bedroom. But it was also a freeing time. A new generation of employees breathed life into our journalism and products, while financial independence gave the company, which I incorporated as a public benefit corporation, new purpose. The Paycheck Protection Program, for small businesses affected by the pandemic, helped keep us afloat.

Investors who specialized in "distressed assets" would call from time-to-time. They all had the same idea: Fire most of the staff and reboot Quartz as an email-only publication focused on aggregation of business news. As a business model, it might have made sense, but it wasn't appealing. Muddling along with few or no journalists would be a worse outcome, I felt, than just shutting the place down.

That is how I came to realize Quartz was, and always had been, its people. The hundreds of people who built and constantly rebuilt Quartz, who did the work, who supported each other through all the changes, who gave the place its values, and who brought those values to other companies when they moved on. (Quartz alumni are all over today's great media companies, 22 of us at The Times alone.) We really did believe in what we were doing.

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So how did such an earnest enterprise end up in the maws of private equity? By 2022, we were running short of cash and didn't have anyone willing to put up more money, especially as enthusiasm waned for the entire digital-media sector. We put together a quick M&A process and made clear that preference would go to anyone willing to take on all of the roughly 80 people still working at Quartz.

G/O was the only suitor willing to make that commitment, and still bid three times more than the next-highest offer. That meant there was enough cash in the deal to share more than $1 million of the proceeds with employees, who each got a stake in Quartz when we went independent. It was a far better outcome than I thought possible when we started the process, just desperate to survive.

My own investment would also turn out well, thanks to G/O's stubborn insistence that it only wanted Quartz's assets and not the corporate entity, which for complicated accounting reasons was still pretty valuable. I mention all these details, I must admit, out of spite. Jim would often talk about his feeling that journalists were bad businesspeople and taunt us about past decisions by asking, "How'd that work out for you?" Now G/O is in retreat, and today's strongest for-profit media companies are run by former reporters.

At one point late in the sale process, Jim acted like he was no longer interested, and stopped returning my calls. That forced us to stare down the prospect of running completely out of cash and collapsing, Messenger-style, as Jim well knew. We had no choice but to call his bluff. He went ahead with the purchase.

§

I put on a brave face, but we were under no illusions about the likely fate of Quartz under G/O's ownership. The sale immediately prompted obituaries; New York magazine deemed us "the history of internet media in just 10 years," which I still take as a compliment, even though we wanted 100 years.

It's still not quite clear to me what Jim thought he was buying or why he was so desperate to have it. In the subject line of his email announcing the deal, he spelled our name "Quarts," and that set the tone for the level of care in what he had bought. But borrowing money was still incredibly cheap at that time (interest rates were about to surge, another case of good timing), and I guess the allure of an existing media brand was too hard to resist. In retrospect, "it's impossible to kill" sounds to me less like an adage and more like a challenge.

Everyone who could quit did so as soon as they could. A few diehards held on longer, and were tortured or fired, or both, for their sacrifice. I left on the day my contract allowed it, exactly a year after the sale. G/O ultimately filled up the site with 2000s-era slideshows and AI-generated earnings stories. It took another two years for me to process the loss and for G/O to complete its demolition.

The media business often feels like a battle between idealists and cynics. Most of my favorite news startups of the current era have chosen the non-profit path, which has its own major challenges, but at least cynicism is not one of them. Quartz is now a zombie brand, which is the most cynical move in media.

I never wanted to write this piece while good people were still working at Quartz. Now it can be laid to rest.