Any way to watch old tournaments?
8d 10h ago by lemmy.world/u/anon6789 in sumo
Just finished up watching the May tournament last night.
I had been watching the half hour videos on the NHK Youtube channel, but when I went to watch the final last night, I saw it was pulled. From browsing the NHK main site, it seems they pull the videos after a couple weeks. I was able to find the day 15 matches on some random channel, but it was a much tougher watch with the format being so different from being another station's broadcast and everything was in Japanese, so I had to watch each match and then rewatch a bunch to read what happened since I'm still new to this.
I'd been wanting to go back and watch old tournaments to see how some of the guys I like had progressed, but I'd assumed the older ones would all be on the NHK site, so now it seems I'm out of luck.
Is there a go-to place to at least get something close? I was browsing here and r/sumo and there were a bunch of recommendations, but checking out a few, they largely seemed to be commentary and not much of actual match video.
It was exciting to see Wakatakakage win. In the beginning it felt fairly straightforward for Kirishima, and it was fun watching him and all, but once Gonoyama beat him, that got me excited all over again. Ura is probably my favorite to watch because of all his surprising and fast manuevers.
My favorite rikishi though has been Hakunofuji. He was one of the ones I was first able to pick out when I started watching due to his exciting matches, and he always looks very happy, which I like. It sounds like I wasn't the only one to take notice with him, as I heard he won the Fighting Spirit prize, which I of course had never heard of before, but I felt it was appropriate when I did hear of it. 🙂
I'm glad you guys got me interested in checking out sumo. It's been a lot of fun!
old tournaments
Your easiest bet is to look at youtube. I post a bunch of links a couple times a tourney. For example this one has the last couple tourneys on it:
https://www.youtube.com/@sumowithherbert
You'll note that he credits someone called "nattosumo". That is a faceless legend who puts together the videos in a really nice format. Last I heard he had a discord? I suspect there are archives there. Someone here knew more about it, tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip was it you?
If you just want to watch much older bouts, you can look on SumoDB. Go to https://sumodb.sumogames.de/Query_bout.aspxand click "videos only" then click Search. Many have been removed but some are still there. Disadvantage: the listing shows you the winner/loser.
My favorite rikishi
Yeah! part of the fun is picking favorite rikishi!
There are a couple places that have some archives up to varying degrees. The Sunday Morning Sumo guys have the last year or so on their yt channel, and they do commentary in English so it's a good place to hear some things if you're not very familiar with what's going on.
If you don't want to see the days uncut I used to watch a channel run by a guy who went by Kintamayama, who would cut just the top division matches (sometimes from various video sources) back to back. He didn't have much commentary other than maybe a short text comment at the beginning and end of each match, but it was easy to watch because he cut out all the time between the starts of the bouts. He got booted off yt at least a few years ago now, and went over to rumble for a bit, but looks like his channel's still there with only a couple commentary videos from a few years back.
However, although the formatting isn't great on the titles, it looks like pretty much his entire yt channel is on the internet archive. His match coverage starts in 2011 on there and it goes through 2023.
I'm sure there are some other places to find stuff, but on popular sources like yt the sumo association has gotten most of the stuff removed. As you might imagine, being a bunch of old men they aren't exactly great with using tech to promote the sport.
Thank you very much! I will check those out. I figured the association was getting a lot pulled if they were time-limiting the sharing themselves. I'm glad they do have such a nice presentation on the NHK channel, I just was unaware that it didn't remain there.
Is there a place to check out the uncut event? The video I did find of the last day had some things the NHK cut left out like a lot of the high leg stomps and there were groups of 3 rikishi doing things in the ring together that looked interesting. While I wouldn't want that necessarily every time I watch, it would be fun to see it in bits and pieces to see what all goes on, like the guy that comes in with the bow at the end and does his ceremony.
Thanks again!
Is there a place to check out the uncut event?
I don't know about older videos but the Sunday Morning link above has a lot of the days uncut, even starting at the bottom ranks, which is why those videos are like 6 hours long. You can even see the ring judges walk in at the start of the day before the bottom ranks of mostly very new wrestlers start matches in this video, for example (that's the final day of the most recent tournament).
The top division is only two hours and runs from 4-6 PM Japan time, and that's the only part that's broadcast on regular network TV here, but while the tournament is airing you can go online (and probably on some cable networks) and watch hours of the scrubs every day if that's what you're into.
groups of 3 rikishi doing things in the ring together
This is how the yokozuna (champions) do their daily ring-entering ceremony (dohyo-iri). They have two attendants with them (the sword bearer and the dew sweeper) and there are two different styles of entrance involving the stomping you saw. Here's the two ceremonies back to back on a day from January when both yokozuna were there and not out hurt. The other top division guys file in at the same time in two groups (depending if they're in the west or east group for that tournament) and parade around the ring once, which you can see here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Glossary_of_sumo_terms#dohy%C5%8D-iri
Very nice, thank you! I haven't gotten a chance to check out any of the links you guys shared yet, but it sounds like you've covered everything I'm looking for! Really appreciate it!
Thank you kindly! I think it was your big link post I was checking out. Appreciate all the help!
oh I just looked it up, it was zabadoh@ani.social who was familiar with the nattosumo videos, a couple months ago they said it was ok to PM them to ask for more info.