WWE: Kurt Angle Recalls Brock Lesnar Breaking His Neck

He won a gold medal with a broken freakin’ neck. Before stepping inside the squared circle, WWE Hall of Famer Kurt Angle was an accomplished amateur wrestler, eventually taking his talents to the 1996 Olympic Games where he won gold in the heavyweight weight class. While that injury was Angle’s most infamous, the Olympian was not immune to more physical setbacks in his subsequent professional wrestling career. Angle hurt his neck once more in 2003 during a confrontation with Brock Lesnar. The Beast Incarnate swung a chair at Angle’s head, resulting in yet another broken neck.

“What happened was Brock Lesnar hit me over the head with a chair, and he brought it,” Angle said on his podcast (h/t Fightful). “I mean, when I tell you he brought it, he really brought it. The thing is, me and Chris Benoit both got hit with a chair by Brock that night. Chris, before the match started, he told Brock, ‘Hey, swing sideways on my head because I had surgery on my neck, and I don’t want you to come over straight over the top.’”

Angle was aware of Benoit’s request, but did not ask for the accommodation himself.

“I didn’t tell Brock,” Angle continued. “So he hits Benoit sideways, and Benoit’s neck is okay. He goes over the top and hits me right on top of my head as hard as he could, and I broke — three broken vertebrae. I had bone chips in my neck, and I had two discs that slid into my spinal cord. So I kind of messed myself up again. This is the third time I broke my neck.”

Weapons-based head shots have been mostly done away with in modern professional wrestling. WWE banned chair shots to the head altogether in 2010, with rare instances like Edge and Randy Orton’s con-chair-tos or Triple H and Daniel Bryan’s ring post-related chair shots breaking that rule. Bryan and Orton were even fined in Summer 2013 for having a chair shot to the head during one of their matches on Monday Night Raw.

Angle returns to WWE programming tonight on Raw is XXX.