[sumo] Spooky sumo display may be making some Olympic ho…

[Katrina Watts]

No problems in the final rounds yesterday, but in the preliminary rounds the day before some horses really didn’t like the sumo wrestler.  

One grey horse shied badly and refused to go near the jump, though it did manage to jump through when coming at it from a different angle during the competition after taking a very wide approach.

The commentator mentioned that in the past when figures of cows or horses have been used on the wings of the jumps horses don’t like them either.  

I thought the kabuki faces were more scary, but probably just looked like lines to a horse.  One horse wasn’t too keen on the Tokyo Olympics mascot on one side of the last jump in the final round.  Part of the rider’s skill to gain the confidence of the horse enough to trust that what it is being asked to jump is in fact safe.

The Japanese cultural themes displayed in the jumps were varied and imaginative, temples, castles, cherry blossoms also a bullet train, origami, chopsticks and traditional hair ornaments as well as bamboo fences and stone bridges.  

Interestingly, in the arena almost empty of spectators, like at the Kokugikan without audience, you could hear the horses breathing and the riders clicking encouragement to their mounts or even saying “Go”.

In the final result - won by Britain and with the Japanese rider 6th - there were 3 horses from Sweden in the top 5.  The Swedish horses compete “barefoot”.  They seemed to do very well that way and didn’t have the problem of throwing a shoe on the way round the course as happened a to  a couple of competititors.

Sorry, too much information perhaps but then my mother used to say that I only got interested in sumo when I went to Japan because I couldn’t hang out with horses.  I had to admit there were some similarities.  The young rikishi wearing wooden geta sounded like horse clipclopping along the street, wrestlers lived in stables, they were powerful and their bodies steamed like horses during keiko, and afterwards the sweaty dirty rikishi were  sometimes scraped down with a piece of bamboo like scraping the sweat or water off a wet horse.

Now back living in rural Australia I see more horses than rikishi, thank goodness it’s only just over a month to the September basho!

Katrina
Sent from my iPad

> On 5 Aug 2021, at 1:51 am, Barbara Ann <barbara.a.klein at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I have to say that I watched the equestrian event as far as it was broadcast here. While the commentator stated that four horses that went before the ones being shown in the broadcast received  a penalty,   those were for time and there was no mention  of the statue. In the remaining  16 or so participants that were televised , including the three Americans  (with Springsteen' daughter ) none  seemed to be  visibly phased by the statue.
> 
> Maybe it was the riders who were spooked and not the horses. Just sayin'. 
> 
> Tidbit: none of the Americans qualified for the individual finals,  but can still participate in the group competition. 
> 
> Cheers,
> Barbara Ann 
> 
> Sent from my iPad
> 
>> On Aug 4, 2021, at 10:45 AM, Jeffrey Anderson <jpaitv at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/spooky-sumo-display-may-be-making-some-olympic-horses-jumpy
>> 
>> This is in a lot of papers worldwide this morning. 
>> 
>> Gaijingai
>> Sent from my iPhone
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