One thing I find amusing, is the reputation sumo wrestlers have for being morbidly obese. You think ‘sumo’ and a picture comes to mind of massive, almost comically overweight men in traditional cloth diapers, lumbering towards one another in the ring like six-foot babies. This isn’t quite how they started out, or how they have been, traditionally. I hope to right some historical wrongs here.
Traditionally speaking, a sumo wrestler was, first and foremost, a buff man. Few were lean, but quite a few weren’t fat. Some of the earliest known photographs of sumo wrestlers shows men over six feet tall with large, muscular frames. Few had large bellies, no man boobs anywhere in sight. The enormous weight seems to be a… relatively new thing. It wasn’t the norm before, as it is now.
Some of the earliest known images of the top sumo wrestlers from various eras, show huge, hulking men. Manly dudes. But not fat dudes. Hell, back in the day? Many a Japanese girl would swoon over them. Their status was on par with that of moviestars. Some of these guys were like, a really, really strong version of Ronaldo or Lewis Hamilton. Top of their game. Top of the world.
You’d go to town in 1920s or 1930s Japan and you’d see some huge, tall dude with the frame of a modern-day NFL linebacker. They’d often have a gorgeous girl on each arm. Money for days. Hair and outfit perfectly on-point. They were rockstars, man! A sumo wrestler, if he played his card rights, would start his own ‘stable’ and train a new generation of wrestlers. He could well become a multi-millionaire from his cut of the many deals he’d make, the tournaments he’d organize and the prize money his star pupils would make…
It was big business. Big guys and big business.
To end my answer, here’s the late Chiyonofuji Mitsugu. He reached the highest rank in sumo, that of yokozuna. He weighed about 280 pounds in his prime, and almost all of it was muscle. The man absolutely dominated his sport like few wrestlers ever managed.
In recent decades, Japanese wrestling stables fly in huge and often obese Samoan wrestlers, failed football or rugby talents or enormous lads from Eastern Europe with the size of a champion but lacking the nimble grace of a true Greco-Roman wrestler. They fly these guys in, put them on even more high-fat diets and have them train their asses off. And it often results in a great show, no doubt about it — enormously tall, enormously fat men having a go at it. Spectacular! As close to King Kong as we can humanly get.
But, no. This isn’t what sumo wrestling was traditionally all about. It wasn’t some freakshow. It was just very, very strong men trying to push one another out of the ring. It’s kind of tragic to see their ancient art diluted to “lol really fat dudes!” because, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Sumo wrestlers are rockstars.
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