SAO PAULO: If the word “sumo wrestler” calls to thoughts a hefty Asian guy in a loincloth, Valeria and Diana Dall’Olio, a mother-daughter sumo wrestling staff from Brazil, have a message: suppose once more.
The Dall’Olios are used to other folks announcing they’re too small, too fragile or too feminine to apply a game usually related to hulking Japanese males.
But they are saying this is simply gas for his or her combating spirit once they get in the “dojo,” or ring.
“There’s a lot of prejudice. When you say you practice sumo, some people think you have to be fat,” Valeria, 39, tells AFP, as she prepares for a contest at a public fitness center in Sao Paulo.
“Women are always under a microscope in the martial arts, because they’re sports that have generally been restricted to male fighters.”
She were given into martial arts as a lady, finding out judo and jiu-jitsu.
In 2016, she fell in love with sumo, which was once dropped at Brazil by means of Japanese immigrants in the early twentieth century.
Soon, she was once profitable bouts — all of the method as much as the Brazilian nationwide name, which she received thrice (2018, 2019 and 2021) in the middleweight class (65 to 73 kilograms, 143 to 161 kilos).
She added the South American championship to her trophy case in 2021.
More combating spirit
“I try to balance my different lives: homemaker, mother of two. I don’t have much free time,” Valeria says.
Women are banned from skilled sumo in Japan.
In its birthplace, the extremely ritualised game has been related for greater than 1,500 years to the Shinto faith, whose believers have historically observed ladies as impure or unhealthy success for sumo.
In the previous, ladies have been banned from attending bouts and even touching sumo wrestlers.
But a global newbie ladies’s sumo championship has been held since 2001. Organisers hope to sooner or later flip it into an Olympic game.
Being allowed to compete “is a real victory for us,” says Valeria.
“We’ve got more fighting spirit than men, who usually aren’t used to battling on as many fronts as we are.”
Diana, 18, says she by no means had a lot passion in wrestling — till she was once drawn to sumo by means of its velocity.
The bouts, in which wrestlers compete to fall or push one some other from a round, dirt-floor ring, infrequently last longer than 30 seconds.
Strength, technique and methodology are the whole thing.
Diana placed on a “mawashi,” or sumo loincloth, for the primary time in 2019.
She now competes as a light-weight (underneath 65 kilograms).
“You can feel the prejudice,” she says of other folks’s reactions to her number of game.
“A lot of people say, ‘Women are fragile, they get injured and quit,'” she says.
“That’s one of the things we’re learning to fight against. My generation is rising up.”
Battle for admire
Sumo is rising rapid in Brazil, principally thank you to ladies, says Oscar Morio Tsuchiya, president of the Brazilian Sumo Confederation.
Women make up round part the rustic’s 600 sumo wrestlers, he says.
“Because of the Shinto rituals, in which women couldn’t even go to the ring, a lot of traditionalists were horrified when they started to compete. But those barriers are being broken,” he says.
At their Sao Paulo fitness center, the Dall’Olios push aside the dojo’s dust after a difficult day, in which Diana received one among her 3 bouts and Valeria misplaced her just one, in opposition to 18-time Brazilian middleweight champion Luciana Watanabe.
Watanabe, 37, is the general public face of sumo in Brazil.
She stocks her hobby for the game by means of educating it to kids in Suzano, a small town with a big Japanese-Brazilian inhabitants 50 kilometres (31 miles) outdoor Sao Paulo.
“Men are usually the ones who teach sumo,” she says.
“But I think I inspire the kids when I show them my titles.”
She, too, says her function is to “break prejudice.”
“I want people to respect this sport more,” she says.
“So many people still think it´s just a sport for fat men. Sumo is for everyone.”
