This is Chiyotaikai. He's a sumo wrestler from kokonoe-beya who's been struggling for a long time to stay at the top of the sport, despite the fact he's clearly past his prime. Yesterday, Chiyotaikai broke my heart.
He cheated. Or at least someone cheated on his behalf. Yesterday in his match against miyabiyama (misashigawa beya), the sluggish chiyotaikai barely laid a finger on miyabiyama before miyabiyama dropped like a stone. No slip, no uncontrolled momentum, he just fell down, making no effort to prevent it. The announcer was pretty shy about analyzing the match, and with the next match coming up there was no time for dwelling on the past.
I like sumo. I've been watching the english langauge broadcast regularly every tournament for the last couple years, and I've never noticed anything this bad. Granted, I've been talking about sumo fixing in the abstract for the last week over at marxy's place so maybe I'm much more aware of this sort of thing now. Maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. Maybe peace and legitimacy reign over sumo.
But sumo has a bit of a shady history in the late 20th century (and before too). I'll add some more about that later, but for now, it's study time. I decided to use a time and make sure I study at least 2 hours every day until the big test in 78 days.
(click the picture for a link to dichne.com, a pretty authoritative site that I stole the picture from)
Also, I joined a forum to deal with my grief... read some discussion about the match here.
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