10 Holy Sh*t Wrestling Moments You Didn’t Know About
3. The Most Gross Move Kenny Omega Ever Took
"I wanted to pull out all the stops, so there was this one move in the match where I took a Frankensteiner - or a hurricanrana, however you'd like to call it - from the top rope to the floor and that was probably, to this day, the most shocking fall that I've ever had to absorb. You feel your insides bounce and hit the top of your ribcage. It was gross and I would never do it again. Seeing the footage scares me."
- Kenny Omega, talking to Alicia Atout in 2017.
Omega rose to the stratosphere in 2016, as the Bullet Club's Cleaner, but entered his breakthrough elite-level performance in 2012. His DDT 15th Anniversary match with Golden Lover Kota Ibushi was a terrifying and incredible amplification of a core wrestling truth: the level of trust is so deep that wrestlers hit their closest friends the hardest. To exacerbate everything, this was the theme of the match.
The Lovers, so close that at one point Ibushi forgot his partner was his rival, looking desperately at the corner before eating a proto-V-Trigger, worked a match premised on the extremes of love as their relationship collided with individual ambition.
A brutal affair loaded with pathos, and worked with an unreal athleticism that informed the dominant genre of the decade, it was infamous for the Balcony Dive that saw Ibushi banned from the Budokan Hall and the first and to date only One-Winged Angel kick-out. In a lesser-known beat, Omega - a wrestler whose lip was destroyed in a sickening(ly awesome) G1 match opposite Tomohiro Ishii years later - took a move he regretted even more than that two-hour hospital trip.
The Frankensteiner to the floor was a sight that inspired as much awe as disgust: an unhinged risk compounded by the sheer velocity generated.