Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play.
Note: I know very little about sports and being on a sports team, so please point out anything that doesn’t make sense.
Sumo’s actually a crock of shit, they predicted it in Freakonomics and it was revealed a few years later, I was living in Japan at the time and found it very trippy. I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.
Yeah see that’s why I can’t ever take anyone’s opinion on it seriously, because they just say shit like this. It’s like, only a step away from “oh Americans should be good at sumo because Americans are all fat right and you just need to be fat and they wear diapers right?”. Which itself is about two steps away from just like, “Haha look at the funny fat men and how fat they are, what freaks for being fat.”, which is an incredibly depressing sentiment. It’s like calling baseball boring. I mean yeah, it is, but obviously, baseball fans will hate it if you say that, because it being boring as fuck is kind of the point of the sport. If you watch the matches you can tell pretty easily that most of them aren’t faked.
Nah, man, it’s a grappling art with a pretty large amount of universal applicability and no real weight classes, more similar to the conventional folk wrestling styles that many different cultures have. Mongolian jacket wrestling, mud wrestling, lots of European countries even have folk wrestling styles that they don’t care about too much anymore. It’s more similar to Judo, or something, and most people don’t question the efficacy or reality of Judo. American folk wrestling became rough-and-tumble fighting, and also became carnie circus shit right after the civil war, and then spread around everywhere until the Japanese decided to just kind of make it real with shooto and basically start MMA as we know it today, arguably with some interference from Brazilian Vale Tudo guys. The UFC’s involvement mostly being tenuous carnie shit. Go watch like the first three or four UFC’s, it’s basically garbage.
The more complicated download on the match fixing that came about in sumo is that 14 wrestlers were convicted, some stable masters. The sport as a whole, as with many sports in Japan, has a bunch of Yakuza involvement and toxic hazing and other bullshit. There’s already a Wikipedia link on it. Hakusho just got massively demoted like last year because some jackass in his stable was found to be hazing newcomers and haranguing people for money. I dunno, somehow I’m not gonna call all boxing rigged just because every now and again they find out that some high profile match was rigged due to the nature of the sport’s overarching regulatory structure.
Obviously there’s technique to it, it wouldn’t have survived as a competitive martial art otherwise. But the Japanese watch sumo for cultural reasons rather than because of their passion for the technique. It has a place in modern culture that links Japanese people to their deep-seated traditions. It’s like someone uninterested in sport knowing who’s playing on a given weekend, so they can comment on it as a neutral topic of discussion while getting their hair cut.
Doesn’t mean that it’s not a crock of shit. And I’m not saying boxing isn’t exactly the same either. Sumo is just more of a traditional practice akin to ritual than it is to actual sport or martial art. But I don’t know why I’m bothering to reply, since apparently none of this matters to you because your opening sentence demonstrates you don’t know how to structure an argument without alienating your interlocutor.