Taihō Kōki

大鵬 幸喜
Taihō Kōki

Personal data
real name	Naya Kōki
Born	May 29, 1940
place of birth	Shisuka
Died	19th January 2013
size	1.87 m
Weight	153 kg
Career
Heya	Nishonoseki
Career record	872-181-136 746-144-136 (makuuchi)
debut	September 1956
Highest rank	Yokozuna
Tournament victories	32
resignation	May 1971

Taihō Kōki ( Japanese 大鵬 幸喜 ; born May 29, 1940 in Shisuka (today: Poronaisk ) as Naya Kōki ( 納 谷 幸喜 ); † January 19, 2013 in Tokyo ) was one of the most important Japanese sumo wrestlers of the post-war period. He was 1.87 m tall and weighed about 153 kg as an active wrestler .

Along with Kitanoumi Toshimitsu and Chiyonofuji Mitsugu, Taihō was one of the three great yokozuna who determined sumo wrestling from the 1960s to the 1980s and all of them came from the island of Hokkaidō . Taihō was not born there, but had already come to Hokkaidō as a child with his parents (father Ukrainian, mother Japanese) when the Japanese-occupied island of Sakhalin fell to the USSR towards the end of the war .

In 1956 Taihō, whose fighting name means “big peng ” (often translated as phoenix ), competed for the first time for the Nishonoseki-beya and was named the 48th yokozuna in 1961 (the age record of 21 years that Taihō set with it, Kitanoumi beat 1974 by a month). Taihō was far superior to most of his opponents in his time and was able to win six basho twice in a row, for example . His fight record was just as sensational, with over four times as many victories as defeats. With 32 wins, he held the record for the most tournament wins in the Makuuchi division until 2015. In January 2015 Hakuhō was able to beat this record. He was able to win 8 tournaments with a 15-0 balance. In 1971 Taihō retired from active sport. His career was overshadowed by serious health problems that culminated in a stroke that he suffered three years after retiring at the age of just 35.

When he retired from active sport, Taihō was the first rikishi to be granted non-share membership in the Japanese Sumo Association . He founded the Taihō-beya stable , which he ran until 2004, when he handed it over to his son-in-law Otake Tadashige . In 2000, Taihō re- entered the ring with a special 60th birthday ceremony for a former yokozuna, the Kanreki Dohyo-iri . In 2005 he finally retired from the business due to age. He died in a Tokyo hospital in 2013.

Web links

• Profile on Sumo Reference
• Info page of the Japanese Sumo Association ( Memento from February 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive )

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Taihō is the family name, Kōki the first name.