AEW's Kris Statlander Gives an Update on Her Return From Injury

Kris Statlander was one of the rising stars of AEW's women's division for the first half of 2020, earning a pair of title shots against Riho and Nyla Rose. Unfortunately, she tore her ACL on an episode of AEW Dynamite back in June, and other than a few Being The Elite cameos she hasn't been seen since. Statlander gave a new interview with Wrestling Inc. this week where she provided an update on the injury, saying that while she's ahead of schedule it could be another eight months before she's back in action.

"I'm doing pretty good," she said. "I think from what I've heard overall is that I might be a little bit ahead of others where I'm at right now, but I still have a real long way to go before I can re-debut basically and get back in the ring before I'm debuting again obviously, and I'm going to want to be training a little bit before. So I'll be able to get in the ring before you'll see me back on TV. It could be another eight months or so."

The injury happened while she was in a tag match with Hikaru Shida, Nyla Rose and Penelope Ford on what was otherwise a routine suicide dive spot. She admitted she struggled emotionally during the first few months or recovery.

"You can only work out for so long in a day when you're injured and you just see all your friends, and everyone doing awesomely on TV and you're just like, 'man, I just want to be a part of that so bad, and I just feel like I'm useless to this division.' So there was a good two-three straight months where I cried every single night because I felt like I had just been failing everybody, and I don't even know what happened when I got injured," she said.

"I just did a suicide dive, and the way I landed, I guess, was not perfectly right," Statlander continued. "You can actually see the dive on TV when I heard it, but all you see is me quickly grab my leg when I go down, and then the camera's off of me. But it doesn't even look like I did anything super insane, or it doesn't look very noticeable. 'Oh, she messed up her leg there.' You cannot tell at all. So I had no idea what happened. I just kind of felt a little 'pfft' in my leg. It didn't even hurt that bad either. I was just like, 'oh boy.'"