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Eikokurai

Grand Slams in Ozumo

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On 22/06/2021 at 19:49, RabidJohn said:

I don't see how winning six bashos on the trot during one calendar year is in any way superior to winning six on the trot with other start and finish points. 

A year is an absolute: the time it takes for the earth to make one orbit around the sun. A calendar year is an arbitrary imposition. The Gregorian calendar may be in the ascendancy at the moment, but it has no more meaning than any other that's existed in different cultures around the world.

Hakuho won six yusho on the trot twice to Asashoryu's once - end of.

 

On 23/06/2021 at 01:26, Eikokurai said:

You can say that about literally every sport out there. Why is winning four tennis Grand Slams in a season marked down in the history books as a separate accomplishment to winning two plus two over two seasons, which only counts as a career grand slam? People like organization and as arbitrary as it may seem, calendar years are used to provide start and end points all the time in all walks of life. Sumo awards prizes for most wins in a year too. Why not award one for most wins over any random six-basho period? And just to be really obtuse, 28 straight wins across two basho (e.g. from day 2 of Hatsu to day 14 of Haru) is not regarded as valuable as 15 straight wins in one, despite being the superior athletic achievement. The latter will get you a zensho yusho while the former may not even be enough for one yusho, let alone two, if circumstances fall the wrong way.

Anyway, it’s not me who came up with this. I didn’t invent the Japanese names for these achievements. And the point is moot anyway. This is about the grand slam, not consecutive yusho wins, which is a separate, albeit overlapping, accomplishment.

Oh, and if you think the start of a new year is totally arbitrary, ask Hakuho why his record at Hatsu is so much worse than all the others. He’s won just the four times in January, while no fewer than seven times at all other basho. That makes it his weakest month by some margin. Maybe it’s not so arbitrary after all. ;)

Here’s a whole Japanese Wikipedia page on it, though it seems maybe I should in fact refer to Asashoryu’s feat as 年間完全制覇. Only this gets special attention, not other consecutive winning streaks.

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/全6場所制覇

And for the avoidance of confusion about the meaning of Grand Slam, the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry on it:

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/grand_slam

Necroposting, but I've only just seen this.

I believe the tennis-sumo analogy in this case is flawed, for the very simple reason that sumo tournaments are as evenly spaced as possible within the year, whereas tennis majors are not (RG, WB and USO are quite tightly packed inside some 3-odd months, from late May to late August/early September). This makes the calendar year "grand slam" as likely as a non-calendar year one in sumo (ignoring other shite, like end-of-year celebrations and such), but not so likely in tennis (case in point, Djokovic made his non-calendar year slam starting at Wimbledon, and nobody made a calendar year slam in something like 45 years now, and, with the exception of stamina-fiend Djokovic, nobody even came close).

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