Pierre-Olivier Leclerc

Pierre-Olivier Leclerc was born in May 1993 in Longueuil, Québec, Canada, a city situated just across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. Winter sports defined his formative years, with ice hockey and skiing occupying the center of his competitive life. He played organized hockey for approximately ten years, forging the discipline and competitive mindset that would later translate directly onto the grappling mats.

At age 18, Leclerc relocated to Montreal and developed a growing interest in mixed martial arts — an enthusiasm shaped in large part by the rise of Canadian MMA icon Georges St-Pierre, whose UFC dominance had made combat sports a point of national pride. GSP's success made TriStar Gym, the Montreal facility behind his ascent, a natural destination for a young Canadian drawn to the sport.

Leclerc joined TriStar Gym in 2014, and the facility became the cornerstone of his grappling development. Under the guidance of head coach Firas Zahabi, he progressed from beginner to elite competitor over the course of nearly a decade. That mentorship proved to be one of the defining constants in his career — a foundational bond that held firm even as Leclerc's training took him across North America in pursuit of the sport's highest levels of technical knowledge.

Despite extended stints at other elite facilities, Leclerc maintained his identity as a TriStar representative throughout his entire career. That relationship reached its formal milestone on January 14, 2023, when Zahabi promoted Leclerc to the rank of black belt — a recognition of sustained dedication, competitive achievement, and nearly a decade of shared development.

The mid-2010s brought a seismic shift to submission grappling, with heel hooks and lower-body entanglements moving from fringe techniques to the central currency of elite no-gi competition. In 2015, Firas Zahabi brought two of the movement's most prominent figures — Eddie Cummings and Gary Tonon — to TriStar to share the heel hook system being developed at New York's Blue Basement training space. The experience proved transformative for Leclerc and his close TriStar training partners Oliver Taza and Ethan Crelinsten, opening a new dimension of technical depth and competitive possibility.

The connection to New York deepened through an unlikely conduit: TriStar colleague and MMA fighter Tom Breese, who had developed a strong interest in the teachings of coach John Danaher and began making regular trips to the Blue Basement. During preparations for a cage fight, Breese brought one of Danaher's standout students — Gordon Ryan, at the time a purple belt — to Montreal as part of his training camp. Training alongside Ryan gave Leclerc and his peers a direct line into the evolving system, accelerating their leg-lock development considerably. Leclerc is recognized as a member of the broader group that pioneered the revival of the leg-lock game in professional grappling during the late 2010s — a movement that fundamentally reshaped how submission grappling is understood and practiced at the highest levels.

Those early encounters with the New York grappling scene motivated Leclerc to seek out the source directly. During his purple and brown belt years, he began making regular trips to train at the Blue Basement under John Danaher, spending extended periods immersed in Danaher's systematic approach to leg entanglements and positional theory. The experience exposed him to one of the most analytically rigorous coaching environments in the history of the sport, while TriStar Gym remained his competitive home base throughout.

When Danaher's original training group eventually split and several top students formed the B-Team and relocated to Austin, Texas, Leclerc extended his cross-training network once again, spending significant time training alongside that squad. The arc of his development — from Montreal to New York to Austin and back — mirrors the broader story of how elite no-gi grappling knowledge disseminated outward from the Blue Basement during that era, reshaping competitive grappling on a global scale.

Leclerc competed almost exclusively in no-gi throughout his career, aligning his focus entirely with the submission wrestling discipline he embraced in 2015. One of the more striking aspects of his trajectory is how early he tested himself against the sport's top tier: as a purple belt, he entered professional events and faced black belts at competitions including Kasai and the ADCC Trials — a reflection of the confidence built through years of immersion in elite training environments.

Colored Belt Highlights

At the colored belt level, Leclerc's results were exceptional. He claimed gold at the IBJJF Pan Championship No-Gi as a purple belt in 2019 and repeated that achievement as a brown belt in 2022, demonstrating sustained excellence across multiple belt ranks. A runner-up finish at the IBJJF European Championship No-Gi as a purple belt in 2019 further confirmed his standing among the best no-gi competitors of his generation. An earlier third-place finish at the BJJ Fanatics GP in 2021 — achieved as a brown belt competing in open professional events — illustrated the competitive path he had carved for himself well before reaching the black belt ranks.

Black Belt Competition Results

Leclerc's black belt career has continued along the same high-level trajectory. In 2023, he won the ADCC Dallas Open in the Peso Médio division (82kg/181lbs), a significant result on the ADCC circuit. The following year, 2024, brought back-to-back runner-up finishes at the ADCC Las Vegas Open and the IBJJF European Championship No-Gi — results that underscore his consistent presence at the sharp end of international no-gi competition.