Initial Height-Weight Scatterplot for September 2024 Grand Sumo Tournament
Now that we've got the banzuke, let's see where all the wrestlers land!
The banzuke is out for Wacky Aki! (and I’m not linking banzuke discussion right now, but the issue with ladder arrangements is that everybody has to go somewhere in the ranking.)
I checked the official stats at the JSA site today, and none of the weight measurements have changed yet, even though it’s one of the three tournaments in Tokyo.
Perhaps it’s not yet close enough to the tournament to get updates — I thought I saw pics of the guys getting medical check-ups, but that may just have been some old stuff. I thought the summer jungyo had wrapped up… if there are weight updates, I’ll do an update post.
Anyway, enough preliminaries - here are the graphs, and spreadsheet at the end of the post.
Full Makuuchi September 2024 Scatterplot
As usual, we start with the full 42 Makuuchi wrestlers.
The size of the bubbles are just to attempt to distinguish (approximately) the ranks: the bigger the bubble, the higher the rank (the color goes along with that as well, 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)
Top Maegashira (M01 - M08)
Bottom Maegashira (M09 - M17)
It’s easier to look in those different groups.
Sanyaku September 2024
Alas, Takakeisho is no Ozeki, no mo’.
He’s now dropped down to Sekiwake with Kirishima, and many (most) of us are skeptical that he will be able to fight back up to Ozeki.
That said, Takakeisho was able to hang onto Ozeki rank for quite some time: checking in on the Sumo Database, he has been at Ozeki since November 2019. He had first made Ozeki in May 2019, and dropped back to Sekiwake in September 2019, and had been at Ozeki since November 2019. Seems like an excellent Ozeki run to me.
In general, the sizes of the top guys are a bit all over the place. Shorter, taller, lighter, heftier — they’re all here.
I do find it interesting that Abi, Daiesho, and Takakeisho are all the same weight… but very different heights.
Top Maegashira September 2024
This one has an interesting “cluster” or patterns going on — there are more wrestlers to look at, so you can sort of see general groupings.
There seems to be diagonal-ish lines going on here, which may indicate a certain body shape going on in terms of height-to-weight ratios… which will relate to the BMI distribution we will see below.
Bottom Maegashira September 2024
I didn’t mention it above, but I’m using the same axes for all the graphs.
Don’t miss Bushozan in the lower right corner there!
While the higher-ranked groups have some shorter guys who are also lighter, there’s Bushozan who is really heavy and very short.
And then a bunch of tall guys who are also generally heavy.
BMI Distribution September 2024
I thought to look at the BMI distribution in general. BMI is not great for use with athletes, but it gets a general “body shape” (in chubbiness) metric.
For the Makuuchi wrestlers, extremes are represented by two of the shortest guys, where Midorifuji who is also the lightest - leading to the lowest BMI…
…all the way to the highest BMI, with Bushozan, who isn’t the heaviest of the wrestlers, but a combo of being really heavy and short leads to this:
Even Chiyomaru isn’t this eternally round.