![]() ![]() In the past, women were banned from attending bouts or even touching sumo wrestlers.īut an international amateur women’s sumo championship has been held since 2001. In its birthplace, the highly ritualized 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. Women are banned from professional sumo in Japan. I don’t have much free time,” Valeria says. “I try to balance my different lives: homemaker, mother of two. ![]() She added the South American championship to her trophy case in 2021. Soon, she was winning bouts - all the way up to the Brazilian national title, which she won three times (2018, 20) in the middleweight category (65 to 73 kilograms, 143 to 161 pounds). In 2016, she fell in love with sumo, which was brought to Brazil by Japanese immigrants in the early 20th century. ![]() She got into martial arts as a girl, studying judo and jiu-jitsu. “Women are always under a microscope in the martial arts, because they’re sports that have generally been restricted to male fighters.” When you say you practice sumo, some people think you have to be fat,” Valeria, 39, tells AFP, as she prepares for a competition at a public gym in Sao Paulo. The Dall’Olios are used to people saying they are too small, too fragile or too female to practice a sport typically associated with hulking Japanese men.īut they say that is just fuel for their fighting spirit when they get in the “dojo,” or ring. Sao Paulo: 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. ![]()
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