Kawaguchi retiring if he fails Stage 1?

[dakohosu]

Someone mentioned that Kawaguchi was planning on retiring if he fails Stage 1 for the third consecutive time.

I can't remember but I believe it was ArbuthnotBlob who mentioned this on the Sasuke Guessing Game.

Just interested to hear the primary source behind this/whether it's actually true and if so, what do you think of this?

[Ninja Relaxer]

He may have picked a bad year to do it, what with the double Wall and all, but if this is what he needs to motivate him... good, I say.

Frankly, he is the right age to retire (40), so I don't think he'd be making a mistake.

[subtleagent]

It would just be another to the long list of threatened retirements. I mean people get sick of failing over and over. I'm a little amazed he would choose to hang it up over Nagasaki or Kanno or even Ryo. Then again all of them are still in their 30s while Kawaguchi is 40.

Akiyama threatened to retire if he failed the Jump Hang (but than failed the steps and decided it was too low a note to go out on) and Yuuji threatened to retire after 34, but beat Stage 1 so he didn't.

[dakohosu]

40 really isn’t that old anymore. So many competitors like Yuuji, Matsuda, Okuyama, Wakky etc have excelled in their forties and this list would be much longer if a lot of competitors didn’t retire before then due to family or career commitments etc.

Besides, it’s not like Tomo’s done THAT badly for an extended period of time. He’s only failed Stage 1 twice in a row and right at the end, the first being due to weather and the second because he used the same failed technique as he did in 37 which is 100% on him. It’s not like Kanno who hasn’t cleared for 6 years now and has had numerous recurring injuries, or Shunsuke who’s done gradually worse and worse since Sasuke 33. Yuuji threatened retirement after only 3 Stage 1 fails but two of them were really early fails and it was far more obvious that his head just wasn’t in it anymore, as well as him being massively demotivated from USA vs Japan.

I also agree that now is a bad time to retire; he’s facing the Double Warped Wall and in the rain as well as he’s running really late. Also even if he’s not doing that well, surely him competing is free marketing for Per-Adra so it benefits his business as well?

At the end of the day if he wants to retire then he wants to retire, but it seems a bit odd given that he hasn’t really shown any signs of losing interest like Yuuji did around 32-33. Ryo lost all interest and was 5 straight failures in but still came back and eventually broke through. Tomo still trains regularly and is still bumchums with Inui. And again it just seems a bit oddball given that his last Stage 3 attempt was still fairly recent.

[subtleagent]

Maybe not, but 40 is generally the age when an athlete's motivation begins to wane. Which makes sense given that by that point they generally have nothing more to prove or because they don't want to go out with a shoddy track record. 

Here's the video BTW.

[dakohosu]

Yeah I watched the video but couldn't obviously work out what he was saying. All I heard was 'San-kai renzoku Soritatsu Kabe retire' and then some big revelation that I couldn't understand, which does seem as though he's planning on quitting if he fails for a third time.

Also did he lose or gain 6kg? Because most athletes cut down before the competition to be as light on their feet as possible but the 2020-2021 comparison looks as though he's a lot bulkier than before which is not what you want for any of the four stages. Maybe that's an indication that he just doesn't care that much anymore, though he's still going to loads of training sessions so it's sort of conflicting.

Obvs if his head's not in it then it just isn't; competitors are people too with their own lives which a lot of people here don't realize. I just feel that as Ninja Relaxer mentioned, he probably picked the worst time to claim retirement upon failure given that the wall is wet (seriously, the starting platform looks absolutely soaked which is surely going to cause carnage to anyone not just Tomo). Either way, guess we'll see in 3 days.

Happy Christmas btw folks.

[m4tt3r0x]

If the wall's wet then no one should expect him to count it. A wet warped wall is beyond difficult to do. I've tried outside

[dakohosu]

He might not count it to be fair, given that the video was obviously filmed before Sasuke 39 taped so he probably wasn't expecting it to be wet either.

Also, given that the rain seems to be pretty bad towards the end of the stage, what if he fails earlier than the Warped Wall like worst-case scenario he slips on the Rolling Hill (which again given the weather is a genuine possibility even for veterans)? Do you reckon he'd want to come back for another shot at the wall or would it just be more reason for him to throw in the towel? I'm genuinely interested.

I think he will at least reach the Warped Wall though, if the videos leading up to the tournament are anything to go by, given that it almost exclusively focusses on him training on that particular obstacle. I remember before Sasuke 37 that there was a weirdly low amount of coverage on Morimoto which given that he was the most recent champion and was the lone finalist two times in a row, made it obvious (to me at least) that he was going to fail Stage 1. Obvs I could be reading too much into things but I've speculated before on a lot of the 'hype' material and have been right more times than wrong.

[m4tt3r0x]

I think if any of his fails are due to a slip from wet conditions then he should just discount it.

The weirdest thing about all of this is that it's literally only shown raining during Yusuke's run (I'm pretty sure even Yuuji's shots in the videos have shown no actual rain falling and he's #99). lol the look on Yusuke's face with the rain dripping off his face in one of the trailers is just "you have got to be %#*^ing kidding me..." Two runs in a row this guy is running in this weather.

Also can anyone confirm if the first wall of the Ni Ren is actually shorter? I think it is but it doesn't look as short as 28-30's version to me.

Anyway if the course is wet I don't see anyone clearing it. We'll see in just a few days. I do wanna say though I did post here on SMF about a dream I had where Tomo failed the Ni Ren with water on the bottom of it way before the double wall or rainy first stage were ever revealed for this tournament... Granted the dream also had ropes on the top of the walls but yeah... I just thought that was funny

[CustomGaming57]

In addition to what you said, I also had a dream right before SASUKE 38 last year that even worse, Kawaguchi slipped and pulled a Yuuji on the Rolling Hill, falling backwards into the water.

[dakohosu]

That's not entirely true.

It seems to be raining from like #89-94 and then calms down until Yusuke's run. If you look at the Sasuke TBS Instagram page where they list each competitor and show them getting ready for their run, you can see especially before Ryo and Keitaro's runs it's raining pretty badly (

http://instagram.com/p/CX0dnW4tNx9

) which is bad news for both especially as they'v had their fair share of issues with with the Warped Wall.

Sasuke 37 I feel was just an oversight on behalf of the producers. It wasn't raining but it was clearly really damp so they could've easily dried the course prior to competitor's runs but they just didn't realise this until too late. In this case it's actually raining during the runs so there's basically nothing they can do to make it fair to the competitors running later. Tbh they're actually lucky that they haven't had more issues with rain on Stage 1 in the past, as unlike Stage 3 which can be tarped there's literally nothing you can do.

It's a huge shame because it sucks when you have to put asterisks against certain competitors' results because of external circumstances, like Ragivaru and Tomo in Sasuke 32 when it rained for their runs only. At least with Sasuke 8, the bad weather affected pretty much everyone's runs so it was a case of survival of the fittest and most adaptable.

And about the new Soritatsu Kabe, I think the first wall is a bit shorter than the second from the most recent video. The question is whether the second wall is the normal height and the first wall is shorter, or whether the first wall is the normal height and the second wall is even higher, if that makes sense. Either way, I wouldn't be surprised if we get another situation where the last 10 competitors all fail Stage 1 like in Sasuke 22. I've slipped numerous times doing distance running on wet tarmac, and that was flat. On an incline it's going to be absolute carnage.

[dakohosu]

So apparently he’s not retiring according to his latest Instagram post.

Probably a good shout given that the odds were massively stacked against him with the rain this time out.

[m4tt3r0x]

Was he ever even retiring?

[dakohosu]

No idea but a lot of people claimed he was. The video above also sounded like some huge revelation so i think that’s why people assumed that was the case.

[ArbuthnotBlob]

I posted my guessing game then barely looked at the forums afterwards and accidentally created some gigantic rumour mill, apparently!

Yes, according to some people on the various discords, that video was a retirement announcement, and then post-tournament, what with the rain, he has decided to give it another go next year after all - so the classic SASUKE non-retirement!

As-is, I’m glad - I quite like Tomo and I’d have been sad to see him go, especially given the conditions didn’t let him run at his best potential.