They play Major League Baseball at the Olympic Stadium, Tottenham’s ground is a second home for the National Football League, the National Basketball Association is staging a game at the 02 Arena next year, and South Africa just beat New Zealand in a rugby Test at Twickenham, but it’s been a long time since London has hosted anything on the scale of the Grand Sumo Tournament taking place at the Royal Albert Hall this week. Forty wrestlers have flown over from Japan to compete in it. That’s around six tons of elite athlete to be fed, watered, transported and supported.
“We’ve actually had to source and buy new chairs which can take up to 200kg in weight,” says Matthew Todd, the Royal Albert Hall’s harassed director of programming. “Our usual standard is only 100kg.” They’ve also had to reinforce the toilets. “It’s the ones that are screwed into the wall which are the most challenging,” Todd explains, wearily.
They’ve also had to take out special insurance because “the jeopardy of having a ringside cushion is fairly substantial”. And don’t ask him about the rice bill. “It’s substantial,” he says. “I know the wholesaler actually ran out of noodles, because we’d already ordered so many from them.”
Last Saturday Billy Strings was playing bluegrass here and next Monday the Bournemouth Philharmonic will be performing. For the week in between the two, the Royal Albert Hall has been converted into a sumo dohyõ. There’s a five-metre-wide pile of pounded clay and earth squatting in the middle of the venue, and a six-ton wooden roof, purpose-built for the occasion, suspended overhead. They have held tennis matches here, and boxing fights, even a strongman contest. “But this,” Todd says, “is, ahh, an entirely different kettle of fish to our usual programming.”
The Royal Albert Hall has actually hosted a sumo tournament once before, in 1991, as part of the wider cultural festival. The venue wanted to bring it back for its 150th anniversary celebrations in 2021, but plans were ruined by the pandemic.
The event has been a long time in the planning. It is the particular vision of two men, Martin Campbell-White, a promoter who fell in love with the sport when he visited Japan in the 1980s, and who was instrumental in organising the original event in 1991, and Hakkaku Rijicho, the rikishi who won that tournament, and who is now the chairman of the Japanese Sumo Association.
Rijicho has strong memories of his time in London, including, he says, the exact words of the victory speech he had to give in broken English, which he memorised so thoroughly that he is still able recite it verbatim today as his party trick.
“The chairman has a real fondness for this city, and this venue in particular,” Campbell-White says. They showed the officials from the Sumo Association a few possible venues in 1991. Wembley was rejected on the grounds that it was hosting a Luther Vandross concert on the day they visited it, which, the Japanese officials felt, suggested it perhaps lacked the sort of gravitas associated with their country’s national sport. But the Albert Hall’s Royal imprimatur impressed them.
Sumo tournaments don’t often travel outside Japan. There have been occasional exhibition matches in Paris, largely at the behest of the former French president Jacques Chirac, who was an avid fan, but this is only the second time that a full five-day tournament has been held overseas.
“We always had an ambition to come back here,” Rijicho says. “It is a unique, special place for me personally. I like the culture, I like the history, and I like that everyone here drives on the left.” Rijicho says he and Campbell-White have been discussing the idea for the best part of a decade.
It’s a vast operation. The Sumo Association didn’t just bring their own support staff to make the straw bales that surround the ring, and they didn’t just bring their own supply of straw for them to work with, they even brought a supply of the empty beer bottles which are traditionally used as tools to beat the bales into shape.
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For most of the wrestlers, this is their first visit to England. In between training, sleeping (a three-hour afternoon nap to sleep off lunch is an essential part of the regimen), fighting, and their media engagements, they have been exploring the city.
The hotel has, very sweetly, provided them with Japanese language maps showing them the best nearby venues for afternoon tea just in case they get hungry. Both of the sport’s biggest stars, Hõshõryū Tomokatsu and Õnosato Daiki, have made the trip. Hõshõryū singled out Horse Guards Parade as his highlight. Although he did say that he was quite scared of the horses.
Õnosato summed up his first impression of London in the single word “chilly”. Despite the weather, he explained he was happy to be here because he likes Harry Potter. He’s only 25, and was only recently awarded the title of yokozuna, which is the highest rank in the sport. He’s the first Japanese rikishi to win the title since 2017.
Sumo has, Rijicho admits, been through “good times and bad times” in the past few years, when there have been several scandals. Õnosato’s emergence as a first Japanese grand champion in six years has played a large part in a recent boom in popularity.
Tickets are hard to come by in Japan, but almost impossible to obtain in London. A special banner which is only used to thank the crowd for their support after every available seat has been sold, is already hanging, proudly, from one wall of the hall.
