Sumo looks at toll on health
At age 30, Daisuke Shiga has decided to take very early retirement.
The sumo champion, better known by his ring name Tochiazuma, believes his body can simply not keep up.
He has become a rare casualty of what experts say are wider problems of athletes’ health in the thousand-year-old sport, which cherishes both gargantuan physiques and rigid self-discipline.
Tochiazuma retires with the rank of ozeki – second to the coveted title of yokozuna – but only after dealing with a host of serious health problems.
He once shattered his shoulder, which deprived him of his preferred technique of pinning down opponents and tossing them out of the ring,
Tochiazuma decided he had to call it quits after headaches forced him to pull out of the March spring tournament. Doctors later told him that he had been experiencing the early signs of stroke.
“The doctors detected a symptom of a stroke, so it has become difficult for me to fight only with my heart,” Tochiazuma said as he announced his retirement on May 7.
Tochiazuma, who at 1.8 metres (five-foot-11) tall weighs 155 kilograms (342 pounds), also has high blood pressure.
The son of a famous sumo champion, Tochiazuma plans also to follow in his father’s footsteps in retirement by running the Tamanoi stable of wrestlers.
“Tochiazuma’s case is rare,” said Hiroyuki Yoshida, a medical official at the Japan Sumo Association.
“Wrestlers who retire are not only those who are getting older but also those in their 30s or even younger. But it’s very rare for their retirements to be due to medical reasons,” Yoshida told AFP.
In the past three years, only two wrestlers of the 700 in the ring were obliged to give up their careers for medical reasons, Yoshida said.
But he acknowledged that the lifestyle of sumo wrestlers caused problems.
“It’s true that excessive food consumption causes health issues,” he said.
Kazuhiro Kirishima, a sumo champion of the 1980s, recounted the terrible feeling he would have at the dinner table.
“I would force myself each day to get stuffed to the point that I felt that if I had any more I would throw it all up,” Kirishima, who also reached the rank of ozeki, wrote in his memoir “Fumareta Mugi wa Tsuyoku Naru” (“The Stomped Wheat Shall Grow Stronger”).
Besides sitting down to five daily meals, Kirishima recalled he had to put down 20 eggs each day.
“I would set aside a certain number of eggs that I estimated I could eat hard-boiled and then the other ones I would swallow whole with my eyes closed,” he wrote.
The traditional food of sumo wrestlers – which also attracts a niche crowd of non-wrestler gourmands – is known as chanko-nabe, a protein-rich gruel boiled in a pot with meat, vegetables and rice.
Besides compulsive overeating, sumo wrestlers are expected to live by a rigorous schedule of training and competitions.
And compared with stars in other sports, sumo wrestlers have relatively few outlets for personal relaxation, living together at their stables where their keepers closely monitor their exercise and diet.
After a number of sumo wrestlers died from heart attacks, the sport’s authorities in the 1990s stepped up medical checks, particularly of the heart.
The Japan Sumo Association also put an end to diets designed for even more rapid gains in weight, which some athletes had embraced amid the growing presence of larger, foreign athletes.
“Today, the trend is to encourage athletes to have more balanced meals and eat more vegetables,” said Yoshida, the doctor. “Thanks to these efforts, the average weight of sumo wrestlers has gone down in recent years.”
Sumo wrestlers are also drinking and smoking less, he said, adding that sporting authorities were still trying to discourage players from snacking on sweets and other high-energy, fatty foods.
And upon retirement comes another challenge – losing the weight stacked on over a career.
“In general, specialists advise them to lose weight little by little, to cut down on alcohol and, for some of them, to ration their calorie intake as they are doing less exercise,” said Doreen Simmons, a sumo expert based in Japan.
“Some newly retired athletes are in very good form. When you see them in suits at functions, it is difficult to know that they were at one time sumo wrestlers,” she said.
But some wrestlers have not been so lucky.
Konishiki, a breakthrough foreign champion who was born in Hawaii, weighed more than 280 kilograms (615 pounds) when he retired in 1997, a weight that his knees could not support.
He later became outspoken about his trouble losing weight, saying he felt unbearable pain in his knees after walking only a few minutes.
“I think you can say that wrestlers have a life expectancy a little less than that of an ordinary Japanese,” Yoshida said. “But when you compare the life expectancy of an overweight Japanese with a wrestler of the same size, they are almost the same.”
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Compulsive overeating?