Tamyra Mensah-Stock, who made history at the Tokyo Olympics, made her in-ring TV debut with WWE earlier this week. It airs tonight.
She became the Olympic champion at 68 kilograms at the Tokyo Games in 2021, earning her the right to be honored as the first black woman to win gold in freestyle wrestling. For her second world title, she won the 2022 world championship in Belgrade, Serbia.
This past March, she competed in her first match at an NXT house show in Melbourne, Florida, defeating Breanna Covington. This past Tuesday, as part of the NXT Level Up tapings, she made her in-ring TV debut by competing in a singles match.
The Olympic gold medalist faced Wren Sinclair while using Tyra Mae Steele. Many people have wondered why the company would give her a ring name instead of using her real name. In the latest edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dave Meltzer reported that fans are not the only ones asking this question, as people in the company ask the same thing.
Meltzer wrote, “The feeling is that the average WWE fan doesn’t know her name, so they should give her a name they know, unlike with Jade Cargill, where the idea was that the average WWE fan already knows her name and that name has cache.”
It was said that “for a long time, they didn’t show interest, and the reason they did was because of the gold medal.”
NXT Level Up airs every Friday night after SmackDown on Peacock.
