Congratulations to our Ozeki Prediction Contest winners! @GhostVindaloo and @davidaconrad correctly chose Goeido, Takayasu, and Takakeisho as the May Ozeki cohort…and in the right order.

A lot of interesting work has gone into crowd predictions of the future…particularly around financial markets but sports are more interesting, no? So with that in mind, way back in February, I asked Twitter and on the blog, how many ozeki will we have? It turns out, the crowd was right! I was way wrong, as usual, choosing 5. *DO NOT bring up yu-SHODAI. Terrible pun; even worse prediction.*

Entering Haru Basho, there was a lot of uncertainty around this, with Tochinoshin’s kadoban status, and two possible ozeki runs in the offing from recent Emperor’s Cup winners, Takakeisho & Tamawashi. Come to think of it, Tochinoshin may also qualify as a recent yusho winner, but with his injury clearly hampering his success and the inability to sit out January or March to heal, the probability of his demotion was high.

Though Tamawashi’s putative ozeki run was over after the first few days, Takakeisho’s promotion and Tochinoshin’s demotion came down to their epic senshuraku matchup in a spectacular winner-take-all fashion. Perhaps the “Super Unknown” of this banzuke lineup was the lineup order between Goeido and Takayasu, in which case hometown hero Goeido did not disappoint. He put together a great 12-wins to solidify his Ozeki 1 East status for May.

Congratulations to @GhostVindaloo and @davidaconrad for reading the tea leaves better than me, and wear your Tachiai swag proudly!

As Leonid pointed out yesterday, the torikumi is up and ready, with bout pairings for the first two days’ action. With over a month of no sumo, I’ll be over the moon to see Jk24 Chiyooume & Higohikari kick things off in a few hours. I hopped over to the SumoDB to learn a bit more about these two wrestlers and queried both in my Kimarite Dashboard.

Both men are 15+ year veterans of osumo, and both have had their share of struggles, competing in Maezumo again to start the year as both had fallen out of sumo from kyujo tournaments. Neither had remarkable performances in maezumo, the Kokonoe Chiyooume 2-4 and Higohikari going 1-5.

Chiyooume is from Tokyo and has won 256 bouts over a career spanning almost 90 tournaments. He fought under the name Kaneko until his promotion to Sandanme in 2014. He clearly favors yotsu-zumo, with nearly 40% of his wins from yorikiri, followed by 12% uwatenage.

Higohikari, on the other hand, is from Kumamoto and has been a bit of a journeyman, starting at Mihogaseki beya, moving on to Kise, then Kitanoumi, and back to Kise beya. He’s also picked up more than 200 wins over his career but it’s been 12 years since these two have fought, last time both were using different shikona. His sumo style is more balanced than his Kokonoe opponent, actually winning most matches with hatakokomi but also quite a few with oshidashi and yorikiri.

So, what’s the tale of the tape? It looks like Higohikari should come into this with the strategy of keeping Chiyooume off his belt. In their three previous matches (way back in the ’00s!) Chiyooume won two by yorikiri while Higohikari’s sole win back in 2004 was by oshidashi.

When I first planned this article, I was going to write about the Abi/Aoiyama matchup. That one will be interesting in itself as both have the same oshi style. It’s liable to be a real slapfest. But in their one bout from last year, Abi won really quickly. He seemed to gain the advantage with a nodowa, right off the bat, and then backed Aoiyama out. Will Higohikari try to replicate this with his own aggressive oshi-attack (perhaps leading to a pull-down if the plum over-commits)? Or will Chiyooume persevere, establish a solid belt grip, and toss Higohikari to the clay? We’ll find out in a few hours.