Guess Who's Taking Over the Sumo Ring

By Jim Frederick

I love Sumo," says Levan Gorgadze, 18, a former judo champion from Tbilisi, Georgia. And he's good at it too. Gorgadze hit the amateur European sumo tour two years ago, and in this year's Junior World Sumo Championship in Tokyo he finished second in heavyweight competition. With a small-town boy's big-city dream, he hopes to move from amateur to professional in the sacred rings of sumo in the sport's motherland. "The only place to reach the top is in Japan," he says. For the past two months, the 6-ft. 3-in., 276-lb. teen heavyweight has lived and trained with top amateur wrestlers affiliated with Nihon University in Tokyo. Two of his countrymen have enjoyed sumo success in Japan--as have many non-Japanese in the past decade--and Gorgadze hopes to persuade one of the 54 professional sumo beya, or stables, to take him on. But the gods of sumo are against him.

Those gods--who rule the Japan Sumo Association--have long felt that there has been a bit too much foreign infusion. Indeed, in the past two years, the only wrestler to hold the highest sumo rank of yokozuna has been Asashoryu, a 25-year-old sensation from Mongolia (where he was born Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj). Asashoryu has won the past six grand sumo tournaments, and he appears to be on track to win his seventh, which would be a record. One of the most popular up-and-comers today is Kotooshu, 22, a Bulgarian (born Kaloyan Stefanov Mahlyanov) with quick feet and even quicker arm throws. Kotooshu is a media superstar and national sex symbol, dubbed "the [David] Beckham of Sumo" by the Japanese press. If he racks up 12 or more wins over 15 matches during a 15-day contest that ends Nov. 27, his promotion to ozeki, sumo's second highest rank, is virtually guaranteed. Of the 735 wrestlers currently under the Japan Sumo Association (the sport's major league), 58, or 8%, are foreigners, from 12 countries. That is up from less than 2% in 1998. And those foreigners are increasingly crowding the upper echelons, occupying 12 of the sport's top 42 rankings. Thirty-four of today's 58 foreign wrestlers are from Mongolia, which has a strong tradition in a kind of wrestling similar to sumo, but a growing number are from Eastern Europe. Nine wrestlers are from Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, the Czech Republic,Kazakhstan and Russia. (A handful of Americans, like the first non-Japanese yokozuna, Akebonoknown as Chad Rowan to childhood friends in Hawaiirose to the highest ranks of sumo in the early 1990s.)

In Japan, however, sumo is not just a sport but also a revered institution, an intrinsic part of the national genome. A number of its esoteric rituals are rooted in Shinto, the native animist religion, and its training emphasizes ancient Japanese virtues, such as duty, fortitude and respect for elders, as much as it does pure athletic prowess. Even though the foreign invasion has reignited public interest in the stagnating sport, many elders at the clubby and hidebound Japan Sumo Association have become fearful that admitting too many hungry foreign upstarts will dilute what they routinely rhapsodize as professional sumo's unique Japanese character and traditions. In the past decade, they have imposed veritable import quotas and have slowly squeezed the numbers even smaller so that each beya is now allowed only one foreign fighter (a grandfather clause permits a few exceptions). That cap on foreigners may cripple the sport's resurgence and thwart its chances of becoming a genuinely world-class sport, one with Olympic aspirations.

Since most sumo stables have filled their quota, there are very few that can even consider taking on Gorgadze, no matter how bright his prospects. Wearing the traditional mawashi loincloth and taping his feet just before a recent practice, Gorgadze says, "I know I would do well if I were given a shot." If something doesn't open up soon, he says, he will be forced to return to Georgia in January when his temporary visa expires. And that will probably be the end of his dream. "I don't really understand why the rule exists," he says with a shrug. "If I were Japanese, I would already be part of a stable, already be proving myself." While he doesn't speak more than a few words of Japanese, Gorgadze has clearly mastered the essential Japanese virtues of tact, deference and fatalistic perseverance. When asked whether he is outraged by the rule, whether he feels it is unjust, he offers a sheepish smile and says simply, "I try not to think about fair or unfair. For now, the rule is what the rule is, and there is nothing I can do about it."

With reporting by Michiko Toyama/Tokyo