to lose, meanwhile, is consigned to a deep circle of sporting hell. The 1919 Chicago White Sox, who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series (and are therefore known forever as the Black Sox), re- tain a stench of iniquity among even casual baseball fans. The City College of New Yorks championship basketball team, once beloved for its smart and scrappy play, was instantly reviled when it was dis- covered in 1951 that several players had taken mob money to shave points-intentionally missing baskets to help gamblers beat the point spread. Remember Terry Malloy, the tormented former boxer played by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront? As Malloy saw it, all his trou- bles stemmed from the one fight in which he took a dive. Otherwise, he could have had class; he could have been a contender. If cheating to lose is sports premier sin, and if sumo wrestling is   the premier sport of a great nation, cheating to lose couldnt possibly exist in sumo. Could it? Once again, the data can tell the story. As with the Chicago school tests, the data set under consideration here is surpassingly large: the results from nearly every official sumo match among the top rank of Japanese sumo wrestlers between January 1989 and January 2000, a total of 32,000 bouts fought by 281 different wrestlers. The incentive scheme that rules sumo is intricate and extraordi- narily powerful. Each wrestler maintains a ranking that affects every slice of his life: how much money he makes, how large an entourage he carries, how much he gets to eat, sleep, and otherwise take advan- tage of his success. The sixty-six highest-ranked wrestlers in Japan, comprising the makuuchi and juryo divisions, make up the sumo elite. A wrestler near the top of this elite pyramid may earn millions and is treated like royalty. Any wrestler in the top forty earns at least $170,000 a year. The seventieth-ranked wrestler in Japan, mean- while, earns only $15,000 a year. Life isnt very sweet outside the elite. Low-ranked wrestlers must tend to their superiors, preparing their