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
It's the training and the diet that result in this dichotomy.
Fashions come and go in Sumo. Once it was the simply enormous who were preferred and then the very cut looking wrestlers found preference.
The Typhoon was a really big guy but not a fat guy. In fact it was his trouncing of both the Dump Truck and the Sea Slug that showed the weakness of the simply vast sumo, once they were moving they couldn't stop themselves.