Image: Luca Anacoreta on Instagram.
Italian Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt Luca Anacoreta is a European champion again. The vegan grappler from Rome takes gold in the Master 2 black belt medium-heavy division (85.5kg, about 188lb) at the 2026 IBJJF European No-Gi Championship, held at the end of October in Ostia, on the coast just outside his home city.
He gets there the hard way. Anacoreta wins four matches, three on points and one by submission, as he wrote on Instagram, and the official results list him first ahead of Gabriel Augusto Brito Boletta of Qatar BJJ / Vision Brasil.
This is no lucky one-off. The IBJJF results archive shows him winning European No-Gi gold at brown belt in 2013 (open class), at black belt in the adult divisions in 2014 and 2018, and in the Master 1 medium-heavy division in 2023. He also runs his own team, Anacoreta Jiu-Jitsu, and several of his team members make the podium in Ostia too.
In his Italian caption, he wrote:
Even though this is my fifth European title, the excitement feels just like the first time. I was overwhelmed by all the warmth and support.
Anacoreta has been vegan since 2015, and he took a year to make the change gradually, drawing inspiration from other vegan athletes, as he told Great Vegan Athletes. The reason is simple:
I've always been an animal lover, so at a certain point I wanted to change because it seemed like the most coherent thing to do, and I've never regretted it!
His fuel is nothing exotic: rice, pasta, vegetables, legumes, tofu and tempeh. So much for the idea that you need a steak to win a fight on the mats.
The science agrees. A 2021 trial in Sports Medicine from the University of São Paulo, in the home country of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, put 19 habitual vegans and 19 meat eaters through 12 weeks of supervised resistance training with protein matched at 1.6g per kilo of body weight (soy for the vegans, whey for the omnivores). Both groups gained the same leg lean mass, 1.2kg on average, and similar strength. It's a small study of healthy young men, but it points the same way as Anacoreta's medal collection.
He isn't resting for long, either. As he put it in the same post:
Head down, and back to work. Starting Monday, the focus shifts straight to the 2026 World Masters in Abu Dhabi!
Anacoreta joins a long line of plant-powered fighters. Nate Diaz beat Conor McGregor in a shock victory and later submitted Tony Ferguson in his final UFC fight, while Alex Caceres won five straight in the UFC. The Game Changers took the message worldwide, and a controlled trial showed vegans build muscle and strength just as well as meat eaters.
Congratulations Luca. No meat, no problem.