May Not Compete At Aki
With 5 days until the start of Aki, Yokokzuna Hakuho is still too injured to train or prepare for the fall basho. The winner of the past 2 tournaments withdrew from the summer PR tour, complaining of increasing pain in his left knee, which had been bothering him since before the Nagoya tournament.
Quoted in this article in Nikkan Sports, Hakuho states that since withdrawing from Jungyo, he has been unable to do any real practice, no test matches, and has not participated in the intra-heya practice sessions currently happening across Tokyo.
For fans of the great Yokozuna, this comes as hard news, as he is likely (and perhaps encouraged) to sit out the Aki basho.
UPDATE: Some notes from the Tachiai archives on Hakuho’s left knee problems, from September 2016:
This is a real shame. Hakuho is one of my favorites and one of the biggest reasons I watch/got into sumo. It will be a bummer not to see him, but I’d much rather he heal up and come back healthy rather than compete snd make it worse. Fortunately it seems he understands the need to rest and heal to do his best after his foot injury last year. If he wants to reach his 2020 Olympic goal, then pushing it in Aki is not the way to go.
Completely hear you there, Liam. But I am also rather impressed that he is mature enough to know when his body is telling him it’s not ready. Sadly, he is one injury away from retirement. His fans all want that day to be as far in the future as possible.
What I can’t understand is why he returned for the last week of the jungyo if he was injured? Moreover, he didn’t just perform dohyo-iri and gazed at his nails, he actually competed. Why?
My best guess is that he was testing things out to see how bad “bad” was. And possibly in the process he made things worse. This was the same knee he had surgery on last September. For reference:
https://tachiai.org/2016/09/18/hakuho-白鵬-recovery-progressing-resumes-training/
(From the growing archive of Tachiai lore..)
It may take several decades before we see another Hakuho.