Last week, a video clip that showed Professor Fernando Di Pierro appearing to hurt a student while demonstrating a lockdown defense caused alarm throughout the international jiu-jitsu community. The owner of the academy has spoken out in defense of Di Pierro, and now, Di Pierro and his student in the video have both released their version of the situation in a video that was shared by Alliance co-founder Fabio Gurgel.
Gurgel also released this commentary accompanying the video:
“Yesterday I was surprised by a video that is circulating on the internet where a teacher attacks a student in front of the class, the video has 10 seconds and is really shocking. I received hundreds of messages outraged by what happened, the fact gets even more serious when we see the teacher wearing the Alliance kimono.
Our WhatsApp affiliated group was also responsible for strong messages concerned with our school’s reputation, I can understand all the manifestations although I believe that today we must be very careful about the judgments of what we see on the internet.
The first thing I did after the momentary revolt that the scene caused me was to cool down and call the video teacher to understand what had happened and what would be the justification for an attitude so distant from what we preached in our school but before To tell you what happened, I want to introduce you to this teacher.
His name is Fernando “Soluço” Di Pierro, a black belt graduated from my academy in São Paulo and a teacher of our team for more than 15 years, develops a beautiful work in Ecuador where he coordinates more than 20 schools of our team, is trained in Physical education, black judo track, athlete with excellent national and international results defending our team for more than 20 years.
With these credentials and knowing the person well the video simply did not make sense, my question to him was, in what context did this situation occur? Is there any possible explanation?
Yes there is.
The video was edited badly and taken completely out of context, teacher and student were making a joke that later continued with the rest of the group laughing and having fun. No one was hurt as some sensational sites wanted to put and the student in question continues to train in our team and very close to Prof. “Soluço” which alone proves that the video does not reflect our first reading.
Even within this joking context I do not think such actions are acceptable within a jiu-jitsu academy and my position became very clear in our conversation.
I have the same feeling when I see that Polish runner still going on, I do not think that’s how we should educate our students or set an example for them.
Finally, I hope that we all learn from this fact that academies can increasingly take care of their students in the most respectful way possible, that the vehicles that care about promoting jiu jitsu do it in a more professional and less sensational way and at last that all of us before we judge people to worry about knowing a little more about it.
A big hug to everyone.”
Watch the video below and see what you think:
