Height-Weight Scatterplot for January 2026 Grand Sumo Tournament
It's a new year, and we get new weigh-ins! (Plus two newbies to Makuuchi)
The tournament starts in a week, so let’s look at the line-up!
Height-Weight Scatterplot for January 2026 Grand Sumo Tournament
You may notice a new outlier, with Hatsuyama — quite the string bean up there. I’ll talk about him in the banzuke breakout. Being a newbie, he’s in the lowest ranks.
With 42 wrestlers, there are often lots of overlapping points with all of them in one graph, so I’ll be splitting them into three groups below.
There’s a general diagonal ellipse of where the wrestlers fall, given there is a general shape to humans… the short guys tend to be lighter, the taller guys tend to be heavier. I keep track of who is gaining and who is losing weight, too. I will make some remarks on that below as well.
The size of the bubbles is an attempt to distinguish the ranks (approximately): the bigger the bubble, the higher the rank.
(The color goes along with bubble size, but the colors are similar, being from the Hokusai3 colorway of MetBrewer).
I have three subsets of the above scatterplot, as 42 dots, many of which overlap, is a lot to look at:
Sanyaku (Yokozuna, Ozeki, Sekiwake, Komusubi)
Upper Maegashira (M01 - M08)
Lower Maegashira (M09 - M17)
All the graphs use the same limits on both horizontal and vertical axes, allowing you to see where the wrestlers are positioned in relation to height and weight.
Because I will be using the same axes on all three groupings, there will be a bunch of white space in some of these.
Sanyaku January 2026
As I noted last time, we’ve been getting two clusters of wrestler types in the sanyaku: the heavy guys and the “light” guys.
Mind you, even Aonishiki, the smallest of all these wrestlers, at 182cm and 140kg, is still hefting an over-42 BMI. The “light” guys are only relative to the “heavy” ones. The lighter wrestlers are still over 6 foot tall, and over 300 pounds. They are big compared to “normal” people.
In case you were curious, Onosato’s BMI is near 51. Yes, I know BMI is a trash metric for anything here, but it’s a way to compare “heavy” for frame in comparing the wrestlers of different heights.
But unsurprisingly, the “lighter” guys tend to be “tricky” and get on the belt, try to throw, and do things other than straightforward shoving out of the ring. They don’t have the bulk to do that.
Upper Maegashira January 2026
As we go down the ranks, we get a wider diversity of heights and weights.
You get the super-tall Kinbozan as well as the heaviest Atamifuji; you get the short kings Ura and Fujinokawa.
Oh, and a remark: Hakuoho changed his shikona (ring name) to Hakunofuji. Isegahama are all -fujis now. (Except Enho).
Some of these guys have a tough time staying at these ranks, while others comfortably sit here (and collect kinboshi…)
Lower Maegashira January 2026
I circled the three guys who came up from Juryo.
The one circled in purple, Asanoyama, has been in Makuuchi before, having been an ozeki during the pandemic… until he got suspended for a year for breaking COVID protocols. He’s come back to Makuuchi in 2023-2024, but he’s had a rough time due to injuries. So he’s not really new, and he fits in the “big guy” cluster, as it were.
Asahakuryu looks to be about a median wrestler in terms of size.
Hatsuyama, on the other hand…
He doesn’t seem to have really bulked up like the other tall guys.
I looked at the Sumo Database page on Hatsuyama, which very intermittently records wrestler weights:
This guy just doesn’t want to gain weight. I get it.
Weight Change Since September 2025
The only time they really do weigh-ins are at the Tokyo tournaments, so the last weigh-in was in September 2025. Most of the time, the measured height doesn’t change (though that’s not always the case).
I don’t track all the Juryo wrestlers, but I had been tracking Asanoyama, so I knew his weight change (gain of 5 kg).
As you can see, most wrestlers recorded no change in weight. That may or may not be true.
But large weight changes are concerning, whether large losses or gains. The 11 kg loss for Ura (about 24 pounds) — that’s quite a lot, but it could be that he was making a correction to the gains he had been making over the years and getting to a weight more comfortable for him. He’s had yo-yo-ing of weight before. That said, a large drop in weight can indicate an injury.
At the other end, Nishikifuji gained 10 kgs. This is a large increase on top of where he was, and not a yo-yo-ing. We’ll see if he’ll be able to maintain this higher weight.
Last year I looked at largest gainers and losers, but I don’t think it ultimately signalled anything.
Still, it’s interesting to see someone like Hatsuyama who seems not to gain any weight, while others have gained weight to try to gain advantage (such as Hoshoryu):
A gain of 10 to 20 kg can make a large difference.
