LLCoolKay

Thank you for putting this out there! It's great and better than most podcast/YouTube content in between bashos that gets put out there.

It sounded like he was still feeling the after effects of COVID at the start from what I recall from pre-basho talk. It might have taken until Day 5-6 for him to start getting a good nights sleep and be able to breath clearly. Would definitely explain his sudden resurgence.

They're all really good. I played Kakuryu's My Way at my Super Bowl party and my friends didn't realize for most of the song it wasn't the original.

Feeling vindicated in not assuming Hakuho held it until retirement.

Oho wins the yusho as the spirit of Taiho descends upon him and he becomes an unstoppable force of sumo.

Might not matter if he never faced whoever technically held the lineal title at the time. Thanks to the matchmaking, even going undefeated in his last basho could mean he didn't retire as the overall lineal champion. The lineal champion isn't necessarily the best wrestler/fighter/etc. It's just the man who beat the man who beat the man. Hakuho is still the GOAT though, so it doesn't matter much in his case. We all know he's The Man at the end of the day. It isn't certain though. For all we know, the lineal title holder could be way down the banzuke and never faced Hakuho in his final basho. It's unlikely, but possible. We wouldn't know for sure unless someone tracks it all the way through.

So if this is completed the way it started, we'd be able to say definitively (if we're calling the start of the first basho in the database the beginning) who the lineal champion of sumo is.

Hokuseiho J5e

Right but the way they work today is you have a record you want to claim so you call up Guiness World Records and pay a fee to get an official record keeper out to you who then checks and/or observes your record setting event. That's largely all it takes to get a record in the book.

So I wonder who paid Guiness to come out and do the records (since that's all that's really required)?

I wonder if they realize that allowing joint training will benefit Terunofuji just as much? Not that he doesn't have a number of quality training partners at home.

I thought Sokokurai had been retired a lot longer than he had lol. Sorry silly question.

Why would this be done? To let another foreign rikishi retire?

I agree entirely. I am very space limited though, so only important hardbacks get purchased these days in physical format (big deal releases by my favorite authors).

I do a lot of reading. Kindle is maybe the only not evil thing Amazon has done or made.