TOKYO — In Japan, the sumo wrestling ring is sacred ground, blessed by priests and purified with salt before each bout.

But a headline-grabbing scandal over a former wrestler's claim that Japan's national sport is rife with fixed contests has renewed suspicions that sumo is not as clean as its image might suggest.

"I regret what I did in the past," Keisuke Itai said Wednesday, acknowledging that he intentionally lost many bouts. "Sumo wrestlers are true athletes, so there should be no fixed matches."

Since Itai first made his allegations last month, saying he wants to revive flagging interest in the sport with a thorough cleansing, sumo officials have issued ardent protests denying any problem.

As for fans, they aren't necessarily ruffled by the allegations.

"This kind of thing probably happens in any sport, and I imagine it happens in sumo," said Mitsukuni Kida, 56, a ramen-noodle street vendor and sumo devotee. "What can you really do about it? As long as it's not every wrestler, I don't mind."

Some 2,000 years old and with roots in Japan's indigenous Shinto religion, sumo is, along with baseball, the country's most popular sport. Fans see it as more of a cultural treasure than a mere competition.

During bouts, behemoths in colorful silk loincloths and traditional high, bound ponytails stomp around the elevated clay ring and squat, glaring, before trying to wrestle each other down or out of bounds. Bouts usually last no more than seconds.

Star wrestlers are as famous as the best-known actors or pop musicians.

The 15-day tournaments are held six times a year in different cities and televised live.

It's easier to get tickets than it once was. Since the recession hit, the biggest companies aren't buying up the priciest seats, and tickets range from $28 to $143.

But the sport's image has taken a beating in recent years.

Four years ago, in a series of tabloid articles, Itai's stablemaster, the former wrestler Onaruto, talked about wrestlers who smoked marijuana, cheated on their taxes, hung out with gangsters, joined in orgies and frequently lost matches for money.

Officials denied it all. But shortly afterward, three members of Japan's top sumo family were hit with back taxes for failing to report more than $3.7 million in income.

Modernity, meanwhile, is chipping away at sumo's traditional power base — the training "stable," where junior wrestlers do the household chores and wait on senior fighters.

The stables, which subject wrestlers to rigorous practice sessions and strict etiquette, are finding it harder to recruit talent as more wrestlers come up through college sumo clubs.

Foreigners are trickling in, too. While they once had trouble winning acceptance from the tight-knit sumo establishment, they now occupy even the sport's top rank. The last tournament included wrestlers from the United States, Mongolia, China, Argentina and Brazil.

Fans are criticizing a loss of athleticism. Amid a rash of weight-related injuries last year, the sumo association forced wrestlers to take a test measuring their body fat — and told them to go on diets.

The sumo wrestler's staple fare is chanko-nabe, a calorie-rich stew of seaweed stock, chicken, pork, fish, tofu, bean sprouts, cabbage, carrots, onions and other vegetables.

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Itai, now owner of a chanko-nabe restaurant, like many other former wrestlers, rose to the fourth-highest rank of komusubi but was not particularly famous or popular. At 5-foot-10, with a fighting weight of 306 pounds, he retired in 1991.

Although Itai accused several current stars of taking part in rigged bouts, sumo experts were not impressed.

Andy Adams, publisher of Sumo World, a Tokyo-based magazine, said that bout-rigging — usually arranged among the wrestlers themselves to help someone score the extra win he needs for promotion to a higher rank — goes back hundreds of years.

"There's an old tradition that if you rub my back this time, next time ... I'll rub your back," said Adams. "It's unspoken. Nobody says anything to anybody. It's just sort of understood."

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