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Sarah Cabral Firme Galvao

Promoted by her parents at the 2025 Worlds, the Atos lightweight won European, Pan and Brazilian black belt titles and reached the ADCC final at 20.

Biography

Sarah Galvão is a jiu-jitsu black belt, born in Ubatuba, São Paulo, in 2006, who competes for Atos Jiu-Jitsu and is coached by her parents, André Galvão and Angelica Galvão. They gave her the black belt at the 2025 World Championship, after she had won the brown belt lightweight title there. Over the next fifteen months she won black belt titles at the European, Pan and Brazilian championships, finished second twice at the 2026 Worlds and reached the final of the ADCC World Championship at her first attempt. She fights at lightweight but keeps entering the open class, and in the first three big championships of 2026 that put her in three open-class finals against Gabi Pessanha. Starting out She took up jiu-jitsu at four, stopped at eight and came back at twelve. In a 2024 interview with the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation (IBJJF), she said nobody had ever pushed her into training, even though jiu-jitsu was her parents' profession, and that losing at her first Pan Kids championship was what made her commit to it completely. She has trained at the Atos headquarters in San Diego since childhood, and she belonged from its first day to the Dream Team, the academy's women's competition group led by her parents. Atos says the group started out as talented juveniles and grew into winners at the top level, and its team page names any submission from the back as her favorite technique. Galvão has credited the group for how far she has come: training alongside strong women who had the same goals but different styles, she said, made her a more complete competitor. The person she has looked up to most, as an athlete and as an example, is her father, who says she won world titles at every colored belt from juvenile onward. Speaking in 2026, she said that having two world-champion parents had never felt like pressure to her, but like confidence, with the two of them guiding her as parents and as teachers. The brown belt year Galvão was 18 for the whole of her 2025 brown belt season, and she won the lightweight division at the European Championship, the Pan Championship (the Pans), the Brazilian national championship (the Brasileiro) and the World Championship. At the European and the Brasileiro she also won the open class, where competitors of every weight meet. In the Pans open class she beat Helena Crevar 6-0 in the quarterfinal, passing with the stacking pressure that BJJ Eastern Europe linked to her father's style, before a semifinal loss to Luane Correia left her with bronze. At the Worlds she went into the open class as the top seed and was caught in a kneebar by Aghata Fernandes. Five Atos brown belts had won world titles on the second day of the event, and the academy promoted all five to black belt, with her parents tying on her new belt themselves. Alongside the gi season she had her first professional no-gi matches. In February she made her debut at Who's Number One and submitted her opponent with an americana, a shoulder lock. In March, at the UFC Fight Pass Invitational, she lost a decision to the no-gi world champion Cassia Moura. First months at black belt Later in June 2025 she won both the lightweight and the open black belt divisions at the Asian Championship, and the lightweight division at the American Nationals. At the Craig Jones Invitational 2, held in Las Vegas that August, she was the last athlete added to the event's first women's bracket: four competitors, no weight limit and $100,000 for the winner. She beat Ana Carolina Vieira, the ADCC champion, on a decision, then lost the final to Helena Crevar, who finished her with an Aoki lock, a type of leg lock, and won the prize. As BJJ Eastern Europe noted, that left the two with a win each. Three weeks later she was in Italy to teach a seminar when she was invited, hours before the start, into the Ocean BJJ Pro Finale in Cagliari. She accepted and won the women's lightweight bracket. Previewing the No-Gi Pan Championship at the end of September, FloGrappling's Joe Gilpin wrote that she handled the IBJJF rules as though they were her first language. In October she won the middleweight division there, rather than her usual lightweight, and both IBJJF and Atos called it her first major title at black belt. Writing after that win, her father said he had watched her develop into a professional who combines coaching with competing. Later in October she went back to Who's Number One, for her first appearance there as a black belt, and submitted Trinity Pun with an armbar in Pittsburgh. In November she won the lightweight division of IBJJF's The Crown in Long Beach. IBJJF reported that she did it without conceding a point, beating Cassia Moura, who had defeated her in March, on a decision in the semifinal and Janaina Lebre by a single advantage in the final. Beforehand she had told IBJJF that she felt adrenaline and butterflies going in, but nothing like nervousness. Before the year was out, Polaris signed her to a multi-match contract for 2026. In January FloGrappling named her its 2025 Breakthrough Grappler of the Year, pointing to her run through the brown belt majors, her promotion and a year-end first place among female lightweights, and praising her "balance, timing and positional control". 2026 and Gabi Pessanha At her first European Championship as a black belt, in Lisbon in January 2026, she won her lightweight quarterfinal with a choke from the back and her semifinal with a lapel choke from north-south, and the final against her Atos teammate Tamara Toros was a closeout, meaning the two teammates did not contest it. In the open class she made two submissions on her way to the final, the second a bow-and-arrow choke that won her semifinal in just over a minute. There Gabi Pessanha beat her on advantages, earned with a near sweep and a footlock attempt. Her father, who watched as both parent and coach, wrote that her lightweight win showed she was ready to lead the coming wave of black belt champions, and that the open final had started a new rivalry. Afterwards both women talked about using the sport's biggest stages to set an example and open up more opportunities for the women coming after them. In February she moved up to medium-heavyweight for a gi superfight with Maria Vicentini at IBJJF's Absolute Grand Prix in Long Beach. Her repeated attempts to pass the guard drove Vicentini to turtle, curling up on knees and elbows, and Galvão jumped into an armbar and rolled her over for the finish. At the Pans in March she won lightweight, beating the top-ranked Janaina Lebre in the final on a unanimous referee decision. She worked from top position throughout that match, a rematch of their Crown final. The open-class final was her second against Pessanha. With a minute left she was three advantages behind. With thirty seconds left she hit a single-leg takedown, jumped onto Pessanha's back with both hooks in and scored the four points that won her the title and a double gold. In May, at the Brasileiro in São Paulo, she won lightweight again, which IBJJF counted as her fourth Grand Slam title of the season, and won three open-class matches by armbar to reach a third final with Pessanha. This time Pessanha swept her early and scored twelve points without reply, the most one-sided of their three meetings in IBJJF's view. At the World Championship at the Walter Pyramid in Long Beach, aged 19 and a year into her black belt, she finished second in both of her divisions: in lightweight behind Janaina Maia de Menezes, the athlete IBJJF's reports call Janaina Lebre and whom she had beaten in the Crown and Pans finals, and in the open class behind Pessanha. By her father's count she fought 60 matches in her first year at black belt, faced six black belt world champions along the way and never sat out the open class, even though she competes at lightweight. In June she won lightweight at the American Nationals and took bronze in the open class. IBJJF placed her third among the world's female black belts in June 2026, after one full year at the rank, and wrote that her open-class series with Pessanha had made people look at women's jiu-jitsu as a whole. In late September, listing her for the Pan No-Gi Championship, it still ranked her third and counted five Grand Slam titles, in the gi and in no-gi, from her first black belt campaign. No-gi and the ADCC Galvão calls herself mainly a gi competitor who is still learning with every no-gi camp. In remarks on the Alberto Crane Podcast reported by BJJ Eastern Europe, she described gi and no-gi as two different sports that share the same mechanics: without the jacket there is far more movement and more work for position, stalling is hard, and a single guard pass may be the only one in the match. What she wants, she told FloGrappling, is to be a hybrid athlete, contending for the top in both. Her Polaris debut came on 7 March 2026 in Croydon, London, where she opened the main card against Libby Genge. She got to Genge's back in round one, then ended it in round two with a kimura, set up from closed guard by way of a triangle. In April she won the women's under-65 kg division at the ADCC West Coast Trials in Pomona, California, finishing the final with a rear-naked choke, and so qualified for the ADCC World Championship. In July, at Polaris 38, she won the promotion's bantamweight title, choking Zara Di Tofano with an arm triangle late in the first round; FloGrappling noted that she was still unbeaten in superfights as a black belt. Before her ADCC debut she told FloGrappling that she had copied the preparation her father used for his own ADCC matches, and that defeats come with the sport without defining who she is. In Kraków in September, aged 20, she submitted Livia Barasine in the under-65 kg quarterfinal and won her semifinal 3-0 on points. The final put her against the defending champion, Ana Carolina Vieira, whom she had beaten at CJI 2 a year earlier. It went into a second period of overtime before Vieira submitted her. At the Pan No-Gi Championship in October 2026, Galvão won both the middleweight and open-class divisions. IBJJF counted six wins across the two title runs and credited her with helping Atos take the women's team title.

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