This lady’s name is Hatel Dave, and she wants to be a sumo wrestler. That may not sound very womanly, but Dave (What are you doing, Dave?) has some chops at this sort of thing; she placed fifth in the women’s middleweight category at the 2009 World Games in Taiwan. Yes, they had a middleweight category. In sumo. And yeah, she very well could have been fifth out of five.
Unlike America, the 23-year-old’s native India doesn’t raise money for sports that nobody watches, and her fundraising campaign has been tougher than a rush-hour drive through downtown Calcutta.
“They confuse it with the Tata Sumo car, and others just don’t care,” she says.
“It is frustrating sometimes but I hope I am setting a trend for more girls to join in and make this sport more popular here.”[..]
“I would love to go to Japan and play a match,” she muses.
It’s actually reassuring to see young people do things that may not always be cool or social, and I’m all for throwing down while wearing mawashi and polo tops. Usually you have to rush a frat house to do that sort of thing.
