Word: sumo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Rumors about sumo fixing have been around almost as long as the sport. Four years ago, a tabloid magazine in Japan ran a series of articles alleging yakuza (Japanese mafia) ties and match rigging. Making the claims then were two ex-wrestlers, who died suddenly within 15 hours of each other in the same Nagoya hospital and of the same respiratory ailment. Sumo is indeed filled with mystery. Itai is aware of the fate of previous whistle-blowers. One of the deceased wrestlers was his stable master...
...Sumo has always seemed a peculiar sport. Two behemoth-size men in loincloths rinse out their mouths with water, throw salt in a clay ring and ram their massive bodies against each other for a few seconds under the suspended roof of a Shinto shrine. "Mysterious. Religious. Philosophical." That's how retired wrestler Keisuke Itai describes sumo. But if accusations he is making are to be believed, it is a sport that is also full of cheaters...
Itai, 43, left the ring in 1991 but has stepped back into the sumo spotlight with charges that much of the flesh-to-flesh combat is mere show. In his day, he told TIME, 80% of the matches were fixed, with winner and loser worked out beforehand in the dressing rooms. "Match fixing was kind of matter-of-fact among the wrestlers," says Itai, a jocular, baby-faced giant. "None of us felt any guilt...