As if you needed another reason to love Japan. But now they have invented the sport of Oni Sumo Bubble Jumping. I desperately want to have a go at this.
Brought to you by the Superhuman Sports Society.
Looks like a hell of a lot of fun.
I especially like the bit toward the end of the video, where the guy trips over the bench.
Yeah, cute. However, I can’t see that it has anything to do with sumo.
[LECTURE/RANT]Sumo isn’t “fat guys in diapers” shoving each other with their huge bellies. It does, in fact, take a huge amount of training and skill, and incidentally there are a lot of muscles included in that bulk. Watch a few matches, especially between equally matched opponents at the high end of rankings, and you might begin to understand.[/LECTURE/RANT]
But yeah, cute.
Well, what is, then?
As you might guess from the name, it’s a wrestling match. The wrestlers have just happened to have noticed that bulk helps one to maneuver the opponent and prevent being maneuvered by them.
Non-obese wrestlers are fairly common. The lower weight ranks just aren’t very popular to watch, since (like heavyweight boxing), you know that the bigger guys would always cream them.
No, no. I understand what sumo is I want to know what “fat guys in diapers” shoving each other with their huge bellies is called.
I’ve seen other games with the bubbles, but this is the first I’ve seen with the leg extenders
Brian
Last summer, I got picked as one of the random people in the crowd to try one of the bubble balls (minus the stilts) during intermission. Multiple balls, both adult & kids sizes in a relay race. The woman I went up against, whose husband also came down onto the field - I keystered her! Not only stopped her forward progress but also reversed her direction faster than her legs could move. Luckily she didn’t get hurt & was laughing about it because I was a bit worried for a bit as not everyone is so pleased if you knock their wife on her ass.
Honestly, I tried to hit her (we were told to bump our opponent) but I didn’t mean to level her. :o
My favorite part!
Once when I was living in Hawaii, a Sumo convention was held in Honolulu. The TV news showed the wrestlers piling on at the hotel buffet, and it was not a pretty sight.
They describe it as being safe but that bubble really only seems to protect your torso. When the guy gets knocked over in the initial bout he comes down reasonably hard on his ass or hip. And you could come down on a knee quite hard.
Yeah, those stilts look like a knee injury waiting to happen. Not only do they lengthen your legs, they also extend far behind your leg so you could end up twisting the knee with a lot of torque.
I had the same thought.