Churaumi

I hope the Japanese Olympians carry out a gold top hat. Just seems fitting. My wife and I always had fun spotting him at sumo and it’s the end of more than one era this tournament. RIP ojisan.

Help a brother out. What’s the ring blessing ceremony they do on the Saturday before a basho called? What time does it start, and do we need tickets? We’re going to the May basho and want to catch it. Any fellow forumites interested in tagging along?

Not the most flattering picture, those hives or stretch marks look uncomfortable.

I thought they had already done the registration months ago.

It’s pretty common to do the legal side of it first and then do the ceremonial stuff months later. Some wrestlers even delay things for years. Takarafuji just did his ceremony but has a toddler that was born after he was legally married. Between pro-athlete schedules, arranging the parties, getting the crowd together, it is quite a production to put on. Even regular Japanese do it, just less fabulously.

There’s also a chance Araiso isn’t doing the fundamentals or working out as much. I have no basis for this, other than the basic human tendency toward not doing boring painful stuff if it can be avoided. That, and in some of pictures of practices posted here Araiso is squeaky clean and sweat free while Takayasu looks like a dirty wet sugar cookie. My forecast is Takayasu will outclass him in training in a basho or three and Araiso will start assigning other rikishi to spar with the ozeki. It’s just human nature; Araiso will do less butsugari and more paperwork as his oyakata duties grow more voluminous and he’ll stop being able to keep up in sparring so he won’t.

I think most of the makuuchi newbs will splat on the wall, except Tomokaze. Aminishiki will sneak through as always. Ozeki stay ozeki. Sanyaku more or less stays put. Purple macaron, why not. This prognosticates Churaumi.

There’s a Kaisei joke in here somewhere that I don’t have the stomach to make.

Especially if it wears a Kisenosato mask.

Come on fellas. Cupping isn’t useless. The placebo effect is real. <\sarcasm>

I think most of my fellow Americans would rather be carried around like dead weight than be seen in public in a mawashi. Let alone be on tv and the internet in one. Old habits die hard, I guess. Takayasu, you don’t have to let him win anymore!

I see wear and tear on joints as the big physical problem rikishi face. The NFL isn’t great about that either, but they do train smarter than they used to. Modern top-of-the-line strength training can help stabilize joints, and lower body fat ratios for the same weight. Plus, it pays to be stronger than the competition. That’s kind of the point to all this. Endurance training will help keep good form in long practices to help prevent injury. Maybe they’ll look at the daily routine and optimize it. At least many rikishi are flexible, which goes a long way toward injury prevention. I hope they also incorporate sports psychology into their schemes, it might help prevent the choking.

He only had this tournament and next, then he’d be banzuke-gai and have to start over in maezumo. I’d have waited one more if I were him and do the “go 0-1-6” thing people sometimes do just to stay on the banzuke. Think about how surreal it would be if he drew Hattorizakura for that one bout. Ex-ozeki vs. the least dominant man in professional sports. Might be the bout of the century so far. Can you imagine the mono-ii when they both stand up and walk backward out of the ring at the same time?

My biggest question is if there is the money in sumo to institute much of NFL-style training and rehab techniques. Each team has a whole gaggle of trainers, nutritionists, doctors, therapists, coaches, and other staff whose whole jobs revolve around keeping the athletes on the field. That’s just the team. High-profile athletes then have their own staffs on top of that. I don’t know how deep a prospective Araisobeya’s pockets will be. Hopefully Araiso can learn some things about rehab, nutrition, and smart training habits, but I don’t know how much of that he can recreate staff-wise. Maybe at the ichimon level they can pool resources to employ some of these.

I hope they look into sports medicine and therapy more. That should be an area close to Araiso’s heart. You know, where one of the career-ending injuries was.