Kris Statlander has suffered two incredibly bad knee injuries over the past three years, putting her AEW career in jeopardy.
The Best Friends’ member was one of the most impressive women in AEW since her debut in 2019. Making her first appearances in tag team matches (first on AEW Dark and AEW Dynamite), she quickly alligned herself with the Best Friends and sought out to carve out a niche for herself as the Womens Roster’s very own resident Alien.
However, she soon suffered not one, but two injured knees. Kris Statlander’s knee injuries occurred during two matches in AEW, just as she was about to be on the receiving end of a big push. The first was just after she faced Nyla Rose at AEW Revolution 2020, where she came from a hair’s breadth away from becoming the AEW Women’s Championship. She tore her ACL just a few months later during an episode of AEW Dynamite, sending her packing to the injury room and keeping her out of the ring for 10 months.
Statlander returned the next year, during the Arcade Anarchy match between Best Friends and Miro & Kip Sabian. Her injury was so bad that she missed almost the entirety of 2020 and lost a crucial year of development at the start of her young career in AEW. During the bout, she rose from an arcade grabbed machine to attack Sabian’s wife Penelope Ford and help her team to victory. It also saw a return for Trent during the match, as well as his mother Sue. A projected championship run never materialised due to the horrific injury she suffered.
Unfortunately, the bad luck would strike again just a year later. As she was being built up to face TBS Champion Jade Cargill, Statlander suffered a completely torn ACL and lateral meniscus in her right leg during a match on AEW Dark in August 2020. This came as she was getting set for a big push and had just rejigged her character, under her new moniker of “More Than A Woman” (a nickname that she chose because she wanted to use the Bee Gees song of the same name for her entrance music).
Her second knee injury looks to be an even bigger setback than the first. Multiple ACL tears are never good and usually see more time recovering than the first – see Tegan Nox’s various injuries over the years in the WWE. Kris Statlander’s knee injuries came at the worst times, just as she was going to be made one of the top female pro-wrestlers in the company and a future AEW Women’s Champion.
However, she seems confident and jovial in her recovery. Kris Statlander tweeted out about her injury in September 2022, just weeks after the injury. It featured a photo of her in a hospital bed, post-surgery, with the caption hilariously saying “I must’ve been thinking of you when I got injured, because you make my knees weak. Xoxo”. Mirroring the term “making my knees weak” with her literal “weak knees”, due to her ACL tear, made for a humorous tweet which her followers seemed to enjoy.
Statlander revealed in a recent Tweet that she is still not cleared to compete before jokingly suggesting the headline for news sites reporting the news. Statlander Tweeted, “No I am not cleared yet. “AEW Wrestler Provides Injury Update” is the headline I’m expecting to see.”
Some websites humorously ran with the aforementioned title proffered by Statlander. It is good to see she can make a joke about her injury and we hope she can return to the ring as soon as she is fit, hopefully to start her first run as the AEW Women’s Champion. There is currently no ETA for her return, with optimistic estimated hoping for Kris Statlander to make a comeback from her knee injury around the time of AEW Double or Nothing 2023, or Forbidden Door 2.
In a recent interview, she also confirmed the origins of her alien gimmick, which you can read about by clicking below.