Why it's called the baratoplata

Rafael de Freitas, from Brasília, a Gracie Barra black belt. The nickname Barata — cockroach, in Portuguese — was given to him as a boy playing football, for his quickness and his frantic way of moving.

Born to get around a rule

In training the position kept coming out as a bicep slicer, the lock on the biceps. But the bicep slicer is banned by the IBJJF rules up to and including purple belt — and he was a purple belt. He could not use it in competition.

So he adapted it: same entry, but turned into a shoulder lock, which is legal. By his own account the result came out better than the original.

This is the most interesting point in the whole story. The technique exists because a rulebook banned another one. Rules do not merely restrict the game: they generate it. Half of modern jiu-jitsu is the creative answer to a ban.

And it is not an isolated case. The IBJJF's belt-by-belt limits — on leg locks, on compressions, on knee twists — have produced entire parallel repertoires over the years, built by people who wanted that effect while staying inside the rules of their own belt.

The “-plata” does not mean arm

The name joins the nickname to the suffix taken from omoplata, which means shoulder blade. You often read that “-plata” marks submissions on the arm: that is false, it is not a word and it has no meaning of its own.

What we do not know

• Whether he gave himself the name. It is reported, but without a statement from him to back it up. It would be one of the few times an athlete christened his own technique.
• The exact year. The sources say “as a purple belt”, that is, the late 2000s.

De Freitas showed it to Renzo Gracie, and from there the technique started to travel. It is the recurring last step in these stories: there is always somebody better known who has to see it and take it around.

The other words you will hear at the gym, explained one by one: BJJ glossary.