Ramy
Elgazar

He builds the door
when there isn't one

Ramy Elgazar came up in a sport his country barely funded, in a weight class nobody in the region competed at, from a textile town in the Nile Delta. There was no pathway in front of him, so he made one. He paid for his own flight to the United States in 2015, and three weeks after landing he took the heavyweight title at the US Sumo Open from a champion who had not lost there in eight years.

That is the whole method. He enters rooms where he is the only Egyptian and the only Arab, and he arrives prepared rather than hopeful. Ten national titles. Four US Sumo Open crowns. An international referee licence. Nearly nineteen hundred shows on five continents. A kitchen of his own.

He is also a father and the person his family relies on, and that is not incidental to the story. Every decision in this timeline was taken with that responsibility already on his shoulders. He has never accepted a ceiling on what he is allowed to be.

Athlete. Referee. Performer. Cook. Provider. Each one added without putting down the one before it.

The first international professional sumo competition ever staged in the United Arab Emirates. Nine wrestlers from Japan, Mongolia and Egypt, thirty six bouts in a single day, hosted by the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi in collaboration with USA Sumo. The event sold out before it opened.

Ramy was the only Arab wrestler on the card, in a line up that included a former sekiwake and Emperor's Cup winner, a World Sumo Champion and a wrestler with eight hundred and twenty five career bouts.

"Every time I step into the sumo ring, I feel that I am carrying more than my own name. I am carrying the Egyptian flag and representing millions of people across the Arab world."

He started cooking at seven or eight years old, before sumo entered the picture, in a house where the protein came off the roof. It was never a career plan. It was the thing he loved, and he kept doing it through every year of training.

The obsession turned technical. Competing at the top of the heavyweight division on a diet he designed and paid for himself, he learned nutrition the way he learned groundwork, by study. He now works as a sports nutritionist alongside the sport.

His first food video took half a million views in two hours. Two of his largest collaborations are food rather than sport, Nick DiGiovanni's whole cow cook and unlimited sushi challenge, sixty eight million views between them, plus a campaign for OXO knives and salt.

Everything he puts out is his own. His recipes are developed in his kitchen rather than adapted from anyone else, and the spice blends behind them are built by him and used across the range, which is what gives the food a signature rather than a style.

Sumo Guy
Founder and chief executive of @sumoguy.usa, authentic Egyptian street food, Long Beach and Los Angeles, California.

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Sumo had no Arabic audience because it had no Arabic explanation. The terms, the ranks, the rituals and the rules existed only in Japanese and English, so the sport reached the region as a punchline rather than a discipline.

Ramy built the missing layer himself. Under the tag #سومو_بالعربي and on the dedicated channel @sumobyarabic, he has been teaching sumo in Arabic for years, taking questions from viewers who have never seen a bout and translating the ranks, the rituals and the rules into language the region can follow.

"I started doing sumo in Arabic on social media, to explain sumo to Arab people, because they have this idea about sumo, that it is just fat guys. Sumo means to be more respectful."

It is the reason he is the name the Arab world knows in this sport, and the reason a federation or a brand entering sumo in the region starts with an audience that is already educated rather than one that has to be built from zero.

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