Sumo Suit Athletics World Championships

Posted by Alex in Funny, Sports on September 24, 2009 at 3:21 am

The track and field events of 100 m dash, long jump, high jump, and shot put can get kind of boring after a while. But how should they be improved?

How about with a sumo suit? The people behind the Sumo Suit Athletics World Championships (motto: "slower, lower, weaker!") aim to liberate these events from elitist pro athletes so the (flabby) masses can join in on the fun!

Can’t compete with Usain Bolt over 100m? Not able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Well have no fear, in a Sumo Suit no one can!

Indeed! TYWKIWDBI has the video clip: Link

 
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Sumo Wrestler Accused of Being Too "Podgy"

Posted by Alex in Funny, Sports on July 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

 
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The Sumo Soup

Posted by Alex in Food & Drinks, Sports on December 28, 2008 at 2:16 pm

Just how do sumo wrestlers bulk up for their sport? Turns out, it’s by eating soup!

Here’s a neat article by Tania Kadokura of Saveur magazine about chanko-nabe, a hearty, protein-rich one-pot meal that has been the staple of sumo warriors for over a century:

Today’s wrestlers train and live at heya (stables) run by former sumo champions, where everything from their grooming to their diet is carefully controlled. Because strength and size are factors key to success in sumo, what and how much a wrestler eats are of particular importance. No wonder, then, that the staple dish of the sumo world is a hearty, filling one-pot meal, consisting of broth, vegetables, and meat or seafood, called nabemono, or nabe for short. (Nabe, pronounced nah-bay, means pot; nabemono means things in a pot.) The dish likely dates to the Jomons, who inhabited Japan a dozen millennia ago. The inventors of pottery, they were apparently the first people to cook food in pots.

When nabe is prepared by sumo wrestlers, it’s called chanko-nabe, a name whose origin is unclear – although since chan means father and ko means child, some believe the term refers to a stable , master and his apprentices. The tradition of sumo wrestlers’ eating nabe supposedly began in the early 1900s, when star wrestler ~ turned stable master Hitachiyama ~ (sumo wrestlers traditionally go by a single ring name) made a batch for his charges one day. He quickly realized that the meal ~ usually cooked over a gas burner set on the table with diners gathered around-was not only nutritious and inexpensive but also easy to prepare and eaten in a way that reinforced the communal aspect of the stable. It wasn’t long before other stable masters were serving chanko-nabe, too.

Link – via grow-a-brain

(Photo: Christopher Hirsheimer)

 
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