It’s a fun sport to watch for so many reasons, but the first that stuck out to me when I first saw it was how fast it is. Sure, there’s a lot of ceremony and lead up between matches, but the matches themselves are short and intense. If you watch a summary that cuts straight to the matches or just have it on while you do other stuff and look up when the match is about to start, you’re basically getting nothing but highlights. Every single match is worthy of a slow mo action shot.
The more you learn about it, the more interesting it gets.
4am@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
It’s actually awesome. It’s pretty pure athleticism, so the sport is there. Every wrestler has their own style and personality, and it even comes through when the match lasts 10 seconds. The ring is made from hardened clay and the hay bales that make up the ring are stuffed with gravel - the risk is real and the consequence of losing is pain. These guys are sometimes 400lbs of muscle (and yeah with a ton of body fat on top of it, weight is momentum and momentum is everything) who train constantly and have honed their skills for almost a lifetime to work up the ranks to even be in Grand Sumo in the first place. These dudes go out there to perform for the gods and they go as hard as they can.
It seems silly because people can’t get past “hue hue naked and fat” and they made a trope out of it but it’s just about everything that makes competition “pure” distilled down into a single sport. It’s hard not to pop off after a good top division match, I’m always yelling at the TV.