Sumo

Sumo's officiating is unusual in that the referee can be overruled every time, and everybody expects it.

The gyōji stands in the ring, starts nothing — the wrestlers begin by mutual consent — and must declare a winner immediately, always, and without hesitation. He is required to point his fan at one side even when the finish was too close to see, which is a genuinely strange obligation: the ring official is compelled to make a call he may not be able to make.

Five judges sit around the ring and any of them may raise a hand to dispute the decision. They then climb into the ring and confer in the open, sometimes for minutes, in front of the crowd. They may confirm the referee, reverse him, or order the bout rewrestled. Video review has been used to support this conference since the late 1960s, which makes sumo an early adopter of replay by the standards of the sports on this site.

The calls themselves are physical facts, which is why the sport needs no scoring apparatus. Did a hand touch the clay? Did a heel cross the bales? Almost every dispute is a near-simultaneous finish, where one wrestler is falling as the other steps out — and the sport has an entire doctrine about whether a wrestler who was already irretrievably falling can still win by his opponent touching down first.

Fouls — a closed fist, hair-pulling, an illegal grip — lose the bout outright. There is no lesser penalty anywhere in the sport, which is consistent with a rulebook that has no scale to deduct from.

Professional sumo exists in Japan and nowhere else. Amateur sumo has a map, and it is more interesting than you would expect.

Mongolia is the outstanding case. Mongolian wrestlers have dominated the top of the Japanese professional ranks for extended periods, drawing on a national wrestling tradition — bökh — that transfers unusually well, and on a pathway into Japanese stables that has been well established for decades. The professional association's limits on foreign recruitment exist substantially because of this.

Beyond Mongolia, amateur sumo has real presence in Brazil, through the Japanese-Brazilian community, which is one of the largest Japanese diaspora populations anywhere; in Eastern Europe, particularly Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria and Estonia, drawing on their own belt-wrestling and heavy grappling traditions; in the United States, especially Hawaii, which produced several professional champions; and in Egypt, China and across the Pacific.

The pattern is that sumo travels where a country already has a heavy grappling culture. It is not a sport that arrives somewhere with no wrestling tradition and takes root.

The women's game exists only in the amateur sport and is strongest in the same places — Japan's university system, Eastern Europe, and Brazil — which produces the odd situation of a country's women competing at a world championship in a sport whose professional form would not let them stand in the ring.

Sumo is the oldest continuously practised sport covered on this site, and the only one whose competitive form is inseparable from a religious one.

Its origins are in Shinto ritual — wrestling performed as an offering, to divine an outcome or to ensure a harvest — and elements of that survive unchanged in the professional sport today. The salt thrown into the ring is purification. The referee's costume is that of a Shinto priest. The roof suspended above the ring in a professional arena is a shrine roof, and it was supported by pillars until they were removed in the 1950s because they blocked the view of television cameras.

Court sumo is recorded from the eighth century. Professional sumo as a spectacle dates from the Edo period, when it became a public entertainment performed by paid wrestlers, with the ring, the ranking system and the stable structure taking recognisable shape.

The modern institution is much more recent than the practice. The national professional association was reorganised in 1925, producing a single written rulebook where regional and house traditions had differed. That association — the Japan Sumo Association — still governs the professional sport, alone.

The international sport is younger still. The International Sumo Federation was formed in 1992 to govern amateur sumo outside Japan, and made two decisions the professional body had never made: it introduced weight classes, and it admitted women. Sumo entered the World Games programme in 2001, at Akita, in northern Japan.

So there are two sumos, and the split is the single most important fact about the sport's present. The one with the world championships is not the one with the best wrestlers.

A belt, a clay platform, and a great deal of nothing.

The mawashi is the only garment: a long strip of heavy silk or cotton wound around the waist and between the legs. It is not clothing that happens to be worn during the sport — it is functional equipment, because a large share of the sport's recognised winning techniques involve gripping it. Sumo is one of the few combat sports where what your opponent is wearing is the primary handle by which you move them, which puts it in the same family as judo's jacket and some styles of belt wrestling.

The dohyō is a raised clay platform with a circle 4.55 metres across marked by half-buried straw bales. Clay and sand rather than a mat, and raised rather than flush, so a wrestler leaving the ring falls off it. There is no padding anywhere in the sport.

That absence is the equipment story. Judo has mats, boxing has gloves and a canvas, taekwondo has sensors and body protectors, and fencing has jackets and masks — every combat sport on this site has acquired protective equipment as it learned what it was doing to its athletes. Sumo has acquired none, and its wrestlers land on clay, on sand, or on the people sitting at ringside.

The pillars that once supported the roof over the ring were removed in the 1950s so television cameras could see, and replaced by a suspended canopy. It is a small change and a telling one: the sport has accepted broadcast modifications to its architecture while declining every modification to what happens inside the ring.

Sumo's governance is the clearest example on this site of an international federation that does not govern the top of its own sport.

The Japan Sumo Association runs professional sumo. It holds six tournaments a year, administers the stables in which wrestlers live and train, maintains the ranking ladder, and answers to nobody outside Japan. It has no weight classes, admits no women, and does not enter world championships.

The International Sumo Federation, formed in 1992, governs amateur sumo everywhere else. It has weight classes, men's and women's divisions, IOC recognition, and a World Games place. It does not govern a single professional wrestler.

The consequence is that sumo's world championship is a real competition that does not contain the best sumo wrestlers in the world, and cannot. This is a more extreme version of the problem that got baseball removed from the Olympic programme after 2008 — a professional league declining to release its players — except that here the professional body is not withholding athletes from the international federation so much as existing entirely outside it.

The federation's Olympic ambitions run into this immediately. A sport can plausibly argue for inclusion when its Olympic event would be its pinnacle. Sumo's would not be, and everyone involved knows it.

The professional association has its own political history, and it is not quiet: match-fixing investigations, hazing deaths in stables, and disputes about foreign wrestlers — Mongolian, Eastern European, Pacific Islander — who have dominated the top ranks for extended periods, prompting limits on the number of foreign-born wrestlers a stable may hold.

Weight, and the refusal to class it. Professional sumo has no weight divisions, mass is therefore a direct competitive advantage in a small ring, and wrestlers eat and train to be enormous. The health outcomes — diabetes, joint failure, shortened life expectancy — are documented and are a consequence of a competitive structure rather than of an accident. The international amateur federation introduced weight classes the moment it was founded. The professional sport has not, and this site records that as an unresolved argument rather than a settled tradition.

Women and the dohyō. Women may not enter the professional ring at all. The prohibition has produced repeated public incidents, most notably one in which women who climbed into the ring to give medical aid to a collapsed official were asked over the public address system to leave. The association's stated basis is that the dohyō is a sacred space; critics describe it as discrimination maintained under a religious description. Amateur sumo has had women's world championships since 1997.

Foreign wrestlers. Mongolian, Eastern European, Hawaiian and other foreign-born wrestlers have held the sport's highest ranks for long stretches, and the professional association has imposed limits on how many a stable may recruit. It is a nationality restriction of a kind that would be unthinkable in most sports covered here.

Hazing and stable discipline. Deaths and serious injuries arising from violence within stables have forced changes to the professional sport's internal discipline, and are the reason the association's governance has been scrutinised by Japanese authorities rather than by any sporting body.

Match-fixing. Investigations into arranged bouts led to tournament cancellation and expulsions. Because a bout has no score, a thrown sumo match is unusually difficult to detect from the record.

Recorded as unsettled.

The two sumos. The world championship does not contain the best wrestlers in the world and there is no mechanism by which it could. Whether the international federation should pursue a relationship with the professional association, or accept that it governs a parallel sport, is the question underlying everything else.

Weight classes in the professional sport. The absence produces the sport's characteristic body and its documented health outcomes. The amateur federation adopted classes immediately in 1992; the professional body has never seriously proposed them, and treats the open form as constitutive of the sport.

Women and the dohyō. A religious prohibition, a discrimination complaint, or both. It is argued publicly in Japan, it flares whenever an incident forces it into view, and it has not moved.

Foreign recruitment limits. A cap on how many foreign-born wrestlers a stable may hold is a nationality restriction that no other sport covered here applies to its own domestic competition.

Olympic ambition. The international federation holds recognition and a World Games place. Inclusion would give sumo an Olympic event that is not the sport's pinnacle, which is a weak proposition for the IOC and an odd one for the sport.

Stable welfare. The residential apprenticeship system, its discipline, and the unpaid lower divisions have been examined by Japanese authorities after deaths and abuse cases. It is governed as a Japanese institutional question rather than as a sporting one, which is itself part of what is contested.