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Gallery|Women

Photos: Brazil’s female sumo wrestlers breaking barriers

Brazilian women who practise sumo want to spread this form of ‘dynamic, strategic, fast, and exciting wrestling’.

Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian championship bout. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
Published On 21 Mar 202321 Mar 2023
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If the phrase “sumo wrestler” calls to mind a hefty Asian man in a loincloth, Valeria and Diana Dall’Olio, a mother-daughter sumo wrestling team from Brazil, have a message: think again.

The Dall’Olios are used to people saying they are too small, too fragile or too female to practise a sport typically associated with hulking Japanese men.

But they say that is just fuel for their fighting spirit when they get in the dojo – the ring.

“There’s a lot of prejudice. When you say you practice sumo, some people think you have to be fat,” Valeria, 39, said, as she prepares for a competition at a public gym 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 got into martial arts as a girl, learning judo and jiu-jitsu. In 2016, she fell in love with sumo, which was brought to Brazil by Japanese immigrants in the early 20th century.

Soon, she was winning bouts – all the way up to the Brazilian national title, which she won three times (2018, 2019 and 2021) in the middleweight category (65-73kg or 143-161 pounds). She added the South American championship to her trophy case in 2021.

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Women are banned from professional sumo in Japan. In its birthplace, the highly ritualised sport has been linked for more than 1,500 years to the Shinto religion, whose believers have traditionally seen women as impure or bad luck for sumo.

In the past, women were banned from attending bouts or even touching sumo wrestlers.

But an international amateur women’s sumo championship has been held since 2001. Organisers hope to turn it into an Olympic sport one day.

Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sumo wrestler Luciana Watanabe (R) competes during a Brazilian sumo championship bout. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
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Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sumo wrestler Valéria Dall'Olio and her daughter Diana Dall'Olio watch a Brazilian sumo championship bout. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sumo is growing fast in Brazil, mainly thanks to women, says Oscar Morio Tsuchiya, president of the Brazilian Sumo Confederation. Women make up about half the country's 600 sumo wrestlers, he says. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Luciana Watanabe, 37, is the public face of sumo in Brazil. She shares her passion for the sport by teaching it to children in Suzano, a small city with a large Japanese-Brazilian population 50km (31 miles) outside Sao Paulo. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
The bouts, in which wrestlers compete to push one another from a circular, dirt-floor ring, rarely last more than 30 seconds. Strength, strategy and technique are everything. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Diana, 18, says she never had much interest in wrestling until she was attracted to sumo by its speed. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
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Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
At their Sao Paulo gym, the Dall'Olios brush off the dojo's dirt after a tough day, in which Diana won one of her three bouts and Valeria lost her only one, against 18-time Brazilian middleweight champion Luciana Watanabe. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
'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,' Morio said. [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]
Sumo wrestlers fight during a Brazilian sumo championship bout, a qualifier for the South American championship, in Sao Paulo, Brazil
Diana put on a mawashi, or sumo loincloth, for the first time in 2019. She now competes as a lightweight wrestler. 'You can feel the prejudice,' she says of people's reactions to her choice of sport. 'That's one of the things we're learning to fight against. My generation is rising up.' [Miguel Schincariol/AFP]


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