
Sumo on the Steppes
Bokh, Mongolia's wrestling tradition, dates back some 2,000 years and still draws 40,000 competitors to provincial rounds of the Naadam Festival each year, with 500 fighters advancing to the championship round in Ulaanbaatar. There are no weight classes and no time limit, so bouts can run four hours before one wrestler forces the other to touch the ground. 101 East correspondent Drew Ambrose follows how that training has turned into dominance of Japan's sumo, with grand champions Hakuho and Harumafuji among the Mongolians reshaping the sport with techniques Japanese wrestlers rarely use. Ambrose speaks with Asashoryu, Mongolia's first sumo grand champion, who won all six major tournaments in a single year before controversies over his conduct forced him out. The film also follows Seirou Takeshi, a Mongolian hopeful trying to gain weight and learn Japanese to survive inside a sumo stable, and tracks Japan's 2002 rule limiting each stable to one foreign wrestler. It closes on Mongolian women turning to judo, a sport bokh never opened to them.