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Richard Martin

“Dickie”

Richard Martin, known as Dickie, is a British jiu-jitsu black belt and Carlson Gracie London coach who co-founded the UK Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Association.

Last updated: 9 October 2026

Biography

Richard Martin, known as Dickie, is a British jiu-jitsu black belt and Carlson Gracie London coach who co-founded the UK Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Association. He came to jiu-jitsu at thirty, out of shape by his own published account, with fifteen years of smoking behind him and a couple of yellow belts in other martial arts. By August 2025, the association listed him as its honorary president. What happened in between was not a clean swap of one life for another. He was still trading full time when he and Simon Hayes took charge of Carlson Gracie London in 2006, and a further year passed before he taught a class there. London-born and London-raised, he was still living at the end of 2012 in the part of the city he came from. His teens and twenties went on the futures exchange, where he dealt in derivatives, and on motor racing, which was his sport. He smoked for fifteen years and did no real exercise after his early twenties. At thirty his first child was born, and he took a sabbatical from work around it; the cigarettes stopped and the diet changed. A close friend of his, Simon Hayes, then spent something like four months working on him before he agreed to try a jiu-jitsu class. Martial arts were not quite new to him — a yellow belt in taekwondo and another in Nippon Kempo — but he had wanted a scrap more than a discipline, and nothing had held him until he found an art with little kata and a relaxed room. The class Hayes finally got him to was at the Budokwai in London, and Chen Moraes was teaching. It happened to be a grading night. Martin turned up in a borrowed taekwondo suit and, at around ninety kilos, lifted a lighter man off the floor and dumped him. Within moments he had been choked from behind. He was hooked; from that night he trained three times a week. In Martin's telling, Moraes is the pioneer nearly all British jiu-jitsu leads back to. The association's own history of those years draws the map rather wider, naming several instructors who took up residence at the same time, Moraes among them. Either way the London classes did not last: a couple of months later Moraes had gone to Spain and the Budokwai sessions stopped. The group found a room beneath the Albany Hotel in Earls Court, and that is where Martin ran into Carlson Gracie London. Luca Mengacci and Wilson Junior had set the club up; Wilson taught it with a coach called Sombra, both of them from Rio. Martin dates his own involvement with the team to 2002 and counts himself among its founding members. Wilson's first act was to remove the yellow belt he had only just been given and replace it with a white one: "Now we do like in Brazil." Eleven months or so later Wilson gave him the blue. The club moved on again, to Torquay Street near Paddington: fifty square metres of mat in a hostel basement. To reach it you crossed the hostel itself and went through a big caged door. Membership was perhaps thirty or forty. They called it the Boiler Room. The name outlasted the address. In 2008 Martin explained that the club's old premises, which he placed at Royal Oak, were the original boiler room, and that when they took a floor at Glentham Road he found an enormous boiler in that building too, and read it as a sign they had the right home. Almost all of what is known about his competition record comes from his own accounts. They were given in two long interviews: one in March 2008, one in December 2012, in which he said he was forty-two. The single exception is a published set of division results from 2006. No open results archive covering those years could be reached, so none of it has been checked against one. At blue belt the first London Open went to him, and so did the first Dorset and Hants Open, which Alex De Souza put on. Here the two interviews part company. In 2012 he also claimed the absolute at the British Open as a blue belt, and said that British titles had come his way at both blue and purple, with brown the one he still wanted. The list he gave of his own titles in March 2008 has no British result on it at any belt: at blue, the London Open, the Seni Gracie Invitational, the Dorset and Hampshire Open, and a silver at the Europeans; at purple, European champion, the Seni Gracie Invitational, the Copa Bitteti; at brown, European champion. Both versions are his, and nothing reachable settles which is right. His first European Championship was in 2004, and by the spring of 2008 he had been four times. The first one ended badly. He tapped his opening opponent and made the final. There he had a straight footlock locked on, the other man grimacing, when the referee took the foot off the man's hip; he came back up, fell into a triangle and lost. What competition gave him, he said, was that an error in a match tended to be one he never repeated; and the little voice telling you that you are about to look stupid is also the voice that talks you out of training on a bad night. The real opponent, in his account, is yourself. He also wore a UK vest: a European teams silver in 2004, and the 2007 World Grappling Games in submission wrestling. Two years or so at purple, and he won the Gracie Invitational. That is the one result on this page documented from outside his own telling. The division results published in May 2006 put him at the top of the purple belt heavyweight division, listed for Carlson Gracie London, with Andrew Gallotti second and Helio Pereira third. The entry was above six hundred, and by the report's own reckoning no bigger jiu-jitsu tournament had been held in Europe before it; eight mats, done by six that evening. Wilson Junior promoted him to brown later that year, not long after Wilson himself had been promoted to black by Nelson Solari. That was also the year Mengacci stepped back from running the club, leaving it to Martin and Hayes. Martin took a lease on the first floor of a Glentham Road warehouse in Barnes; the mat space dwarfed the hostel basement, and the club started to grow. He was trading full time throughout; the club, he says, was a labour of love in those years. Teaching came later still: not until 2007, once he was a brown belt and once Nelson Solari had gone. By March 2008 the club had seven instructors. Wilson Junior was at the head; under him were Martin and Hayes, plus Walid Tadjouri, Barnaby Gorton and Nisar Shaikh, and a sixth the interview identifies only as Scottish Brian. Asked how a roster that size worked, Martin gave a deliberate answer: they ran sessions every day of the week, and wanted the timetable broad enough that a member would meet several different approaches rather than one coach's game. He made much the same argument about himself years later. Asked why his own jiu-jitsu was built on movement rather than the pressure his team-mates were known for, he said the gap between individuals is wider than the gap between academies, and pointed at Hayes: the same teacher, the same classes, the same seminars, and jiu-jitsu that looked nothing alike. What they did share was not a style but a manner — polite away from the mat, and on it looking for the submission. The chant "disrespect the legs", heard at competitions around the country, he traced to Ronaldo Campos, who used the words years earlier while demonstrating a pass against the open guard; Hayes then shouted them across a tournament months later to jog a team-mate's memory. In 2008 the team went to competitions as part of BJJ Revolution Team, sharing the banner with Carlson Gracie clubs in Tonbridge and in Hungary and with squads from Greece and Northern Ireland; more than thirty of them travelled to that year's Europeans. There was a Luton club as well, run by Tadjouri. Martin won the brown belt division at those Europeans — Masters brown, as he put it in 2012, though his own list that spring records the title without naming an age division. He talked the three matches through that March. The first was a German who pulled guard: he passed into half guard and on into side control, and finished it with a choke he called a quicker entry to an old Carlson Gracie technique. The second he took down three times with his judo, got past the guard, and then the clock beat him. For the final he had studied the other man's semi-final: a guard loaded with sweeps and attacks from underneath, and a weakness that showed when that man was the one on top. So he pulled guard on purpose, went after the weakness, and finished with a triangle. That same March an interviewer asked how close the black belt was. He deflected: belts had never much concerned him, and too much attention to one could slow a player down. He entered the Gracie Invitational, found no one else in his brown belt division, and took the absolute instead. His first opponent was nineteen, out of Gracie Barra. Martin scored early, got caught in an armbar and defended for a couple of minutes before working loose; then the younger man locked up a second armlock, on his weaker arm. Rather than tap he pulled the arm out and took the injury. He came through that match and went out in the next on an advantage. A few weeks after it Wilson promoted him to black belt. Every belt he holds, he says, came from Wilson. The defeat he calls his hardest came at his third Europeans as a black belt. Illness had spoiled the build-up, but he went in confident, took two matches on points, then waited for the final on a cold floor with nothing to eat. When he stood up his legs would not work. He gave up — the only time he ever did, he says — and offered no resistance to the armbar, with his own students watching. Back home, his instructor produced a magazine write-up of the defeat, with a photograph of the moment. Then he went to a rowing machine and spent seven minutes punishing himself on it. Of the next eleven black belts he met in competition, by his own count, only Victor Estima got away without being submitted, and within a year he had taken the British title, then the Masters and Seniors, then the Europeans. Across 2011 and 2012 he counts British, European and World Masters titles, every one of them finished by submission, and he says he won a title, British or European, at every belt he ever held. In January 2015 a report on a UKBJJA squad training session described him as the reigning IBJJF Masters world champion, without saying which year that title was from. Judo runs through all of it, and the three sources that touch on it look at first like a man contradicting himself. In March 2008 his interviewer framed a question around the premise that he held black belts in both arts. Martin let the framing stand and said his judo fed heavily into his jiu-jitsu. In December 2012 he rejected the framing outright — people commonly assumed he had a judo background, he said, when in fact he came to the sport "from sitting on my couch", and had only started judo as a blue belt. In February 2016, speaking as chairman of the UKBJJA, he stated in his own words that he and two fellow board members held black belts in judo. The three sit together once you notice that two different questions are being asked. What he rejected in 2012 was not the rank but the sequence — the assumption that judo came first and brought him to jiu-jitsu. His judo was done in Ray Stevens's classes at the Budokwai in Chelsea — the same club where he had taken his first jiu-jitsu lesson years earlier, from a different teacher. Four years of weekly ground sparring with Stevens left him a rolling armlock he picked up mainly by being caught in it hundreds of times. Six months alongside a judoka he named as Judo Jim Warren produced some of his most effective techniques. The best groundwork he had ever met, he said, came from Stevens and from Kenzo Nakamura, and the notion that judo has no ground game was something you only believed if you never looked past the nearest club. The two arts, in his argument, are essentially one sport separated by a handful of rules: take the time limit off the ground in judo and elite jiu-jitsu players could compete for its medals. Judo, he thought, deserved study on its own terms, not raiding it for takedowns. Somewhere between the two interviews the trading stopped. In March 2008 he was still dealing interest rate derivatives from home, done by six in the evening, and on the mat — judo or jiu-jitsu — four times a week or more. By December 2012 the job was some years behind him; he had left it for the academy, and said holding down work and competition preparation at once was beyond him. By the end of that year he was describing a full-time operation past its tenth birthday, with six black belts who had come up together at the club from its opening day teaching and training there, and fifty classes a week — judo, wrestling, MMA, Thai boxing, yoga, kettlebells, and jiu-jitsu in both gi and no-gi. The counts are his own. He was also, by then, an elected local councillor, and the brief for promoting sport in his area came with the seat. He hoped to turn it into an easier path for anyone wanting to open a club. He got the sport onto the timetable at his own old school as a curriculum option — the first school in the country to take it, by his account — and he taught teenage classes with the stated aim of mixing young people from different social backgrounds. Two men at a competing London academy get the credit for both, by his account: advice from Roger and Mauricio — the interview gives no surnames — was what allowed the club to go full time and what got the school over the line. The association he helped found began with a decision taken in 2012, after years in which the sport in Britain had run with no governing body at all. It was set up the year after by three experienced black belts: Dave Coles, Simon Hayes and Martin himself. They wanted a sport expanding that fast to have some direction and some safeguards under it. The UKBJJA's own history counts all three among the earliest students of the Brazilian black belts who took up residence in Britain as the 1990s closed: Mauricio Gomes and Chen Moraes, between the Budokwai in London and the Custard Factory in Birmingham, and Wilson Junior starting classes in Earls Court. The same page separately credits Alex De Souza with the sport's growth along the south coast, where he also ran one of the earliest big competitions. Martin was the association's chairman by January 2015 and still held the post in February 2016. By its own account of that stretch, it had put a ranking system in place, and an elite athlete programme that paid for ten competitors to go to the 2016 European Championship; junior and juvenile leagues ran monthly in different parts of the country; members could take courses in refereeing, in nutrition and in strength and conditioning, and could apply for small grants; and it had helped get the sport accepted as a martial art within the armed forces. His 2016 statement about judo belts was made in the middle of a governance fight. That February the board rejected, formally and publicly, an attempt by the British Judo Association to bring jiu-jitsu under a subsidiary organisation of its own. Martin set out what the UKBJJA existed for — to promote, develop and protect the art, a body run by and for the jiu-jitsu community in Britain — and said the decision was not driven by hostility to judo as an art; he put Ray Stevens among those whose contribution to martial arts in the country he respected. Jiu-jitsu, he argued, needed to be in a position to run its own affairs. Recognition came later. In 2021 the sports councils of the four home nations recognised the UKBJJA as the sport's official governing body in the UK. By August 2025 the association was listing Martin as its founder and honorary president, and in that role he thanked the outgoing board ahead of the year's elections. On the academy's own website his name — the full one, Richard Martin — is still there among the head jiu-jitsu coaches. The two beside it are Wilson Junior, who took his yellow belt off him and gave him every belt he has held since, and Simon Hayes, who spent four months getting him through the door in the first place.

Sources for this profile

BJJ Eastern Europe, interview with Dickie Martin, 27 December 2012.(opens in a new tab)
- He gives his full name as Richard Martin and is addressed throughout the interview by the short form Dickie.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, self-introduction, "my name is Richard Martin"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In an interview published at the end of December 2012 he gave his age as forty-two.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "forty two years old"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He described himself in December 2012 as a first-degree black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "a first degree BJJ black belt"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He said he was born and raised in London and still lived in the area where he was born.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "born and bred in London"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He counted himself among the people who started the Carlson Gracie London team in 2002.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "one of the founding members of the team back in 2002"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In his teens and twenties he traded derivatives on a futures exchange for a living.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "working hard as a derivatives trader on the futures exchange"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- By his own account he smoked for fifteen years, gave up most exercise in his early twenties and was in poor shape by thirty; motor racing, not a combat sport, was what he did for sport.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "I smoked for 15 years and stopped doing much exercise"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- At thirty he took a sabbatical from work around the birth of his first child, changed his diet and stopped smoking.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "At 30 I took a sabbatical from work"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- A close friend, Simon Hayes, spent about four months persuading him to try jiu-jitsu before taking him to a session at the Budokwai in London.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "It took about 4 months for me to agree"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- The instructor that night was Chen Moraes.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "The instructor was Chen Moraes"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Martin credits Moraes as the figure almost all British jiu-jitsu can be traced back to.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "can trace its way back to him, he was the pioneer"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He turned up on a grading night in a borrowed taekwondo suit, weighed about ninety kilos against a lighter opponent, picked the man up and dropped him, was choked from behind moments later, and says that settled it: three sessions a week from then on.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "I was 90 kg and very aggressive and picked him up"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Within a couple of months Moraes left for Spain and the Budokwai classes stopped; the group moved to a room under the Albany Hotel in Earls Court.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "Chen moved on to Spain"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- At that room he found Carlson Gracie London, which Luca Mengacci and Wilson Junior had started, with Wilson and a coach called Sombra, both from Rio, taking the classes.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "started by Luca Mengacci and Wilson Junior"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Wilson Junior took away the yellow belt he had just been awarded and put him back to white, telling him the club would now do it the Brazilian way.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "Now we do like in Brazil"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He received his blue belt from Wilson Junior after about eleven months.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "I got my blue belt in about 11 months from Wilson"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- The club then moved to Torquay Street near Paddington: about fifty square metres of mats in a hostel basement, reached through the hostel and a caged door, with perhaps thirty or forty members. They called it the Boiler Room.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "The Boiler Room was born"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Conflicting accounts
  As a blue belt he took the first London Open, won the British Open absolute, and came out on top at the first Dorset and Hants Open, an event run by Alex de Souza.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "a Gold in the first London Open"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Conflicting accounts
  He says he won British titles at blue and at purple belt and wanted one at brown.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "I had won the British Title at blue and purple"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- At the first European Championship in 2004 he submitted his opening opponent and reached the final, where he had a straight footlock locked on before the referee pulled his foot off the opponent hip; he was caught in a triangle on the way back up and lost.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "the referee pulled my foot from his hip"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Two years or so into purple belt he won the Gracie Invitational, and Wilson Junior promoted him to brown in 2006, not long after Wilson had taken his own black belt from Nelson Solari.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "promoted to brown belt by Wilson"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- When Mengacci stepped back in 2006, Martin and Hayes took over running Carlson Gracie London; Martin leased the first floor of a warehouse on Glentham Road in Barnes, which gave the club far more mat space and room to grow.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "Simon and I took over the running of Carlson Gracie London"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He was still trading full time through those years and calls the club a labour of love; he did not start teaching until 2007, by then a brown belt, and only after Nelson Solari had left.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "I only started teaching in 2007 as a brown belt"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In 2008 he won the brown belt Masters division at the European Championship.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "win the Masters Brown belt division at the Europeans"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Entered in the Gracie Invitational weeks before his black belt was due, he found his own brown belt division empty and fought the absolute instead. Against a nineteen-year-old from Gracie Barra he scored early, was caught in an armbar, defended for minutes, broke free, then took a second armlock on his weaker arm and pulled the arm out rather than tap, injuring it. He won that match and lost the next on an advantage.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "there was no-one in my division so I fought the absolute"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Wilson Junior promoted him to black belt a few weeks after that tournament, and he says every belt he holds came from Wilson.
  Where in the source: Answer 2, "Wilson promoted me to Black Belt"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He calls his third European Championship as a black belt his hardest defeat. Ill in the build-up but confident, he won two matches on points, then sat waiting on a cold floor without eating; when he stood for the final his legs would not work, and for the only time in his career he stopped resisting and let the armbar come, in front of his own students.
  Where in the source: Answer 4, "For the first time ever I gave up"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- His instructor showed him a magazine write-up of that loss when he got home, with a photograph of the moment; he says he got up, walked to a rowing machine and punished himself on it for seven minutes.
  Where in the source: Answer 4, "I immediately got up and walked to the rowing machine"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He says that of the next eleven black belts he faced in competition, Victor Estima was the only one he failed to submit, and that he then took the British title, the Masters and Seniors and the Europeans inside a year.
  Where in the source: Answer 4, "the next 11 black belts I faced in competition"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He lists British, European and World Masters titles taken across 2011 and 2012, and says every one of those wins ended in a submission.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "in 2011/12 I won British, European and World Masters titles"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He also says that at every belt he held he took a title, British or European.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "won British or European titles at every belt"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He rejected the idea that he came out of judo, saying he came to jiu-jitsu from his sofa and only took up judo once he was a blue belt.
  Where in the source: Answer 5, "I came to BJJ from sitting on my couch"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He credits four years of weekly ground sparring with Ray Stevens for a rolling armlock he learned by having it done to him hundreds of times, and argues judo should be studied for its own sake rather than mined for takedowns.
  Where in the source: Answer 5, "with Ray Stevens every week for 4 years"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- By the end of 2012 he had given up the trading job some years earlier to run the academy, and said he could not have combined competition preparation with work.
  Where in the source: Answer 6, "I gave up my job a few years ago"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He described the academy at the end of 2012 as full time and more than ten years old, with six black belts who had trained there together since the first day, and fifty classes a week across gi and no-gi jiu-jitsu, Thai boxing, judo, wrestling, MMA, yoga and kettlebells.
  Where in the source: Answer 7, "50 classes per week"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He also sat as an elected local councillor, with responsibility in that role for promoting sport in his area, and hoped to use it to make it easier for people to open sports clubs.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "a Councillor (elected member of local government)"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He got jiu-jitsu accepted as a curriculum sports option at the school he had attended himself, which he says made it the first school in the UK to offer it, and he says he had a great deal of help doing it.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "the first school in the UK to do so"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He taught teenage classes aimed at bringing together young people from different social backgrounds through jiu-jitsu.
  Where in the source: Answer 1, "integrating kids from different social backgrounds"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He credits advice from two people at a rival London academy, named in the interview only as Roger and Mauricio, both for the club being able to go full time and for the school agreeing to put jiu-jitsu on its curriculum.
  Where in the source: Answer 9, "Roger and Mauricio gave us a lot of advice"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Asked why his game was more movement-based than his team-mates, he argued that the differences between individuals are larger than the differences between academies, and pointed to Hayes, who had the same instructor, the same classes and the same seminars and a completely different game. What the club shared, he said, was an approach: polite off the mat, hunting the submission on it.
  Where in the source: Answer 3, "the difference in individuals is greater than the difference"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
On The Mat, Dickie Martin interview by Carl Fisher, 26 March 2008; read from the Internet Archive capture of 21 March 2025.(opens in a new tab)
- Talking through the 2008 European Championship in Portugal, he said he beat a German who pulled guard by passing to half guard, then to side control, and finishing with a choke he described as a faster variation on an old Carlson Gracie technique.
  Where in the source: First answer, on the 2008 Europeans, "I then used the secret choke"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In the second round of the same event he said he leaned on his judo for three takedowns and ran out of time after passing the guard.
  Where in the source: First answer, "I relied heavily on my Judo to get 3 takedowns"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- For the final he said he watched the other man's semi-final, saw that a guard full of sweeps and attacks came with a weakness on top, pulled guard deliberately to exploit it, and finished with a triangle.
  Where in the source: First answer, "I noticed a small weakness in his game"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- His own list of titles in March 2008 ran: London Open, Seni Gracie Invitational, Dorset and Hampshire Open and a European silver at blue belt; European champion, Seni Gracie Invitational and Copa Bitteti at purple; and European champion at brown.
  Where in the source: His own list of titles by belt, "Dorset and Hampshire Open Champion", "European Championships Silver" and "Copa Bitteti Champion"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He said he had represented the UK in jiu-jitsu, taking silver at a European teams event in 2004, and in submission wrestling at the 2007 World Grappling Games.
  Where in the source: Main achievements, "represent the UK in BJJ"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- The interviewer put a question to him as a judo black belt as well as a jiu-jitsu one; he did not dispute the description and answered that judo training was a large part of his jiu-jitsu.
  Where in the source: The judo question put to him, "how does the Judo training compliment your BJJ training"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He argued that judo and jiu-jitsu are essentially one sport divided by a few rules, that removing the time limit on the ground in judo would let elite jiu-jitsu players compete for medals in it, and that the idea judo has no groundwork is nonsense if you look past the nearest club.
  Where in the source: Judo answer, "separated by a few minor differences in the rules"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- For judo he trained under Ray Stevens at the Budokwai in Chelsea, and named Stevens and Kenzo Nakamura as the sources of the most impressive groundwork he had come up against.
  Where in the source: Answer on where he trains judo, "the Budokwai in Chelsea under Ray Stevens"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He attributed some of his most effective techniques to six months of training with a judoka he called Judo Jim Warren.
  Where in the source: Judo answer, "6 months of training with Judo Jim Warren"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In March 2008 Wilson Junior was head instructor at the London club, assisted by Martin, Simon Hayes, Walid Tadjouri, Barnaby Gorton, Nisar Shaikh and a coach the interview names only as Scottish Brian.
  Where in the source: On the club instructors, "Wilson Junior is the head instructor"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He explained the size of that instructor roster as deliberate: sessions every day of the week and a varied timetable, so that members met a range of techniques and styles rather than one coach's game.
  Where in the source: On the instructor roster, "We run training sessions every day of the week"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- At that time the London club competed under the BJJ Revolution Team banner alongside Carlson Gracie clubs in Tonbridge and Hungary and teams from Northern Ireland and Greece, and took more than thirty competitors to the 2008 Europeans.
  Where in the source: On the team, "we are proud to represent the BJJ Revolution Team"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He explained that the Boiler Room name came from the old premises at Royal Oak and followed the club to Glentham Road because that building turned out to have a huge boiler in it too, which he took as a sign it was the right home.
  Where in the source: On the Boiler Room, "the current academy in Glentham Road also has a HUGE boiler"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In March 2008 he was still trading interest rate derivatives, working from home and finishing at six, and training jiu-jitsu or judo at least four times a week.
  Where in the source: On his day job, "I trade interest rate derivatives from home"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He held yellow belts in taekwondo and in Nippon Kempo, and said he had always wanted to scrap but found the formality of martial arts hard to stay with until he met one with little kata and a relaxed atmosphere.
  Where in the source: On other martial arts, "a yellow belt in TKD and another one in Nippon Kempo"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Asked in March 2008 whether a black belt was close, he turned the question aside and said he had never been much concerned with belts and that focusing on one could hold a player's development back.
  Where in the source: On belts, "it can hold back your development"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He said competition sharpened him because a mistake made in a match was usually the last time he made it, and that the small inner voice predicting humiliation is the same one that keeps you off the mat on a hard night. The real opponent, he said, is yourself.
  Where in the source: On competition, "usually the last time I make it"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- Beyond London the team then ran clubs in Tonbridge and in Luton, the latter under Walid Tadjouri, and had a long-standing relationship with Carlson Gracie Hungary.
  Where in the source: On the other clubs, "a club in Luton run by my good friend Walid Tadjouri"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- He traced a chant heard at British competitions, disrespect the legs, back to Ronaldo Campos, who used the phrase years earlier while taking the club through an open-guard pass, and to Hayes shouting it at a tournament months later to remind a team-mate of the technique.
  Where in the source: On the chant, "the saying came from Ronaldo Campos many years ago"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- By March 2008 he had competed at four European Championships, the first of them in 2004.
  Where in the source: On how often he had been, "Four times so far; the first one in 2004"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
On The Mat, report and full results from the Gracie Invitational, 11 May 2006; read from the Internet Archive capture of 24 May 2022.(opens in a new tab)
- The published division results from the 2006 Gracie Invitational place him first in the purple belt heavyweight division for Carlson Gracie London, ahead of Andrew Gallotti and Helio Pereira.
  Where in the source: Results table, division heading "Heavy Weight Purple", then "1 Dickie Martin Carlson Gracie London"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- The same report put the entry at more than six hundred and described the event as the largest jiu-jitsu tournament held in Europe to that date, run over eight mats and finished by six in the evening.
  Where in the source: Event report, "numbers exceeding 600 participants"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
BJJ Eastern Europe, report on the UKBJJA squad for the IBJJF European Championship, 15 January 2015.(opens in a new tab)
- A report from January 2015 on a UKBJJA squad training session named him as the association's chairman and as the reigning IBJJF Masters world champion; he attended alongside the association's performance coach Braulio Estima and its secretary Dave Coles.
  Where in the source: Report on the squad session, "Also in attendance was Dickie Martin"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
United Kingdom Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Association, press release, 24 February 2016.(opens in a new tab)
- The association's own press release says it was set up in 2013 by three experienced jiu-jitsu black belts, Martin, Dave Coles and Simon Hayes, who wanted to give direction and safeguards to a sport that was expanding fast in Britain.
  Where in the source: Press release, on the founding, "set up in 2013 by leading, experienced black belts"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In a UKBJJA press release dated 24 February 2016, Martin was identified as its chairman and set out its aim to promote, develop and protect jiu-jitsu, to be run by and for the British jiu-jitsu community, and to govern its own affairs.
  Where in the source: Publication header, 24 February 2016; Martin attribution and quotation, 'formed to promote, develop and protect the art of BJJ'
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- In a UKBJJA press release dated 24 February 2016, Martin said that he and fellow board members Dave Coles and Simon Hayes held black belts in judo, and named Ray Stevens among the martial arts figures he respected.
  Where in the source: Publication header, "Press release — 24 February 2016 12:00"; Dickie Martin quotation, "myself and two other Board members, Dave Coles and Simon Hayes, are judo black belts"
  Accessed: 2026-10-09
- In the 24 February 2016 UKBJJA release, the board formally rejected the British Judo Association's move to govern jiu-jitsu through a subsidiary body; Martin said the decision was not born of hostility to judo as an art.
  Where in the source: Publication header, 24 February 2016; board-decision paragraph, 'formally reject the moves by the BJA'; Martin quotation, 'not borne out of hostility to Judo as an art'
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- By early 2016 the association he chaired had built a ranking system and an elite athlete programme that sponsored ten competitors to that year's European Championship, ran monthly junior and juvenile leagues around the country, offered members courses in nutrition, refereeing and strength and conditioning along with small grants, and had helped get jiu-jitsu recognised as a martial art in the armed forces.
  Where in the source: Press release, on the work done, "saw 10 individuals sponsored to attend the European Championships in 2016" and "monthly junior and juvenile leagues run across the UK"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
United Kingdom Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Association, About, association history page.(opens in a new tab)
- The association's history page names Dave Coles, Richard Martin and Simon Hayes as its three pioneers, and places them among the first students of the Brazilian black belts who settled in London and Birmingham at the end of the 1990s.
  Where in the source: Association history page, "Among their first students were the three pioneers of the UKBJJA"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- The same page maps where the first resident black belts settled at the end of the 1990s: Chen Moraes and Mauricio Gomes teaching in Birmingham, at the Custard Factory, and in London, at the Budokwai; Wilson Junior taking classes in Earls Court; and Alex De Souza building the sport along the south coast and running one of its largest early tournaments.
  Where in the source: Association history page, "Mauricio Gomes and Chen Moraes started teaching at the Custard Factory"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
- The page dates the decision to form a governing body to 2012, after years in which the sport ran without one, and gives 2021 as the year the four home nations' sports councils recognised the association as the official body for the sport.
  Where in the source: Association history page, "in 2012 members of the different clubs and teams decided"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
United Kingdom Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Association, news item, 1 August 2025.(opens in a new tab)
- As of August 2025 the association lists him as its founder and honorary president; in that capacity he thanked the outgoing board before the year's elections. The same item dates the body's recognition as the national governing body to September 2021.
  Where in the source: News item, attribution line, "Founder and Honorary President Richard Martin said"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20
Carlson Gracie London, academy website, coaching staff listing.(opens in a new tab)
- Carlson Gracie London still lists him, under his full name, among its head jiu-jitsu coaches, alongside Wilson Junior and Simon Hayes.
  Where in the source: Coaching staff listing, "Richard Martin Head BJJ Coach"
  Accessed: 2026-09-20

Lineage

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Open lineage