Sumo Wrestler Accused of Being Too “Podgy”

By Alex in Everything Else on Jul 12, 2009 at 1:39 pm

Every sport has its bad boy (I’m looking at you, Ron Artest), but sumo bad boy Asashoryu Akinori is special.

After a string of bad behaviors including a brawl in a communal bath, being drunk in public and so on, the sumo champ is being accused of … being "podgy"!

Sumo bad boy Asashoryu, no stranger to public criticism, has been labelled "podgy" in a bizarre attack on the volatile Mongolian.

A popular former wrestler now working as a TV commentator accused Asashoryu of being flabby, even though his 150-kilogram frame is relatively small for the sport.

"He looks podgy," Shuhei Mainoumi told Japanese media. "He doesn’t look as buff. When I got flabby I hated being naked and showing off my body — he looks a bit like that."

Um, maybe this is my naiveté but I thought being podgy is the whole point of sumo wrestling? Link

Tags: Asashoryu, bad boy, fat, sumo

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Skipweasel
Jul 12th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
It isn’t all about sheer mass. There was a truly vast Samoan a few years ago – he just couldn’t cut the mustard – smaller chaps chucked him all over the place.
Kalel
Jul 12th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Seems to me his behaviour is a more weighty issue than his being ‘podgy’… nobody likes a pushy Sumo wrestler.
redphone
Jul 12th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Sumo wrestlers aren’t mountains of fat. They’re mountains of muscle.
Mouserz
Jul 12th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Sumo wrestlers are FFFFFing muscular, two of them could probably lift a car.
ashedf
Jul 12th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
like E.Honda.
Vonskippy
Jul 12th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
If they’re “mountains of muscles” they camouflage it well under their layers and layers and layers of drooping fat.
fun games for kids
Jul 12th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Somehow I think it’s hard to please everyone – especially after you gain a bad reputation for yourself. Even after you’ve moved on from the previous mistake, there will be others who will somehow pick on something, no matter how small it may be.
Capt8ball
Jul 13th, 2009 at 4:26 am
Sumo wrestlers are in fact both mountains of muscle and bit fatties. It is the latter OVER the former.

It’s the training and the diet that result in this dichotomy.

Fashions come and go in Sumo. Once it was the simply enormous who were preferred and then the very cut looking wrestlers found preference.

The Typhoon was a really big guy but not a fat guy. In fact it was his trouncing of both the Dump Truck and the Sea Slug that showed the weakness of the simply vast sumo, once they were moving they couldn’t stop themselves.
Sue Dunham
Jul 13th, 2009 at 7:46 am
I think this is plain old Japanese xenophbia/racism.
verloren
Jul 13th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Well the point of Sumo is to win by forcing your opponent to the floor or out of the ring; you get no points for being the chubbiest. But generally no, sumo wrestlers aren’t *just* fat; underneath the fat, which is used as a tactical advantage, there is generally someone built like Chiyonofuji. I certainly wouldn’t wish to call him fat to his face, even now.
Sofar
Jul 13th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
The enormous guts are a byproduct of the enormous amounts of food you have to eat day to day to grow the kind of muscles those guys have. The wrestlers of the occident usually aren’t super-trim neither, though they tend not to grow to such proportions (possibly they would if we didn’t have weight classes in our leagues)

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