Kurt Angle was injured for nearly his entire career.
The Olympic Gold Medallist won at the Olympics with a broken (freakin’) neck in 1996, and continued that trend into his wrestling career. He broke his neck four more times in wrestling, eventually suffering from a painkiller addiction to help deal with his injuries. This didn’t stop him from becoming a multi-time world champion and a WWE Hall of Famer.
Kurt Angle recently spoke with Sam Roberts on Notsam Wrestling about the state of his injuries in wrestling. The WWE Hall of Famer admitted that he was injured for most of his career. However, he stated that the “cool thing” about WWE is that they found a way to work around these injuries.
“The beautiful thing about WWE is, and I’m not saying that what I did was right, but you could work around your injuries. So you know your capabilities,” Angle said (H/T Fightful). “If your neck is broken, you know what you can do and what you can’t do. You try to stay away from the things that you can’t. That’s the cool thing about WWE.
“I was injured 98% of my career,” Angle continued. “I was always hobbled with an injury, I always had to work around them. So I was able to do that. Not that I wasn’t taking a chance. Because when you have a broken neck and you’re wrestling, you land on your neck wrong one more time, and you’re gonna be paralyzed. That’s what the doctors were telling me. Just do not land on your head. They said, ‘You do that, you’re most likely either gonna be paralyzed or you’ll be dead.’”
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