10 Wrestling Moments More Terrifying When You Know The Truth

For all of the intricate choreography and commitment that goes into ensuring the safety of each and every performer involved in a bout going down on your screens (for the most part!), there's still no getting away from the fact that the action often being made to look like a cakewalk by the gifted wrasslers in the middle of the squared-circle comes with a boatload of very real dangers at the best of times.

In the case of the following collection of spine-tingling moments, however, fans were very largely aware that the action going down in front of them wasn't what you'd class as simple or risk-free by any means. But what they didn't know was that the actual truth behind this set of jaw-dropping or cringe-inducing occurrences was infinitely more unsettling than the happening itself.

Simply put, if you need a refresher on just how damn fearless and freakishly professional the average top-tier worker is - sometimes to their own detriment, admittedly - then let this list act as a chilling reminder.

From pulling off an entire match on the back of suffering a sickening injury early on, to wrestling veterans falling victim to a dreaded variable atop a dizzyingly high cage, these entries certainly aren't for the faint-hearted...

Wrestling titan Sting's current All Elite daredevil ways, even at 63-years-young, won't come as too much of a surprise to those who took in the Icon's WCW antics back in the day.

Often taking to dramatically descending from the rafters in the mid-to-late '90s, what you may not have been aware of, though, is the fact that Stinger's first zip-wire assisted leap very nearly went disastrously wrong.

Upon testing out his first-ever rappelling from the rafters sequence for the United Center, January 20, 1997 edition of Nitro, Sting was quick to note "... it was scary."

Sting was so unnerved by the idea of dropping down 140 feet from the sky, after only rehearsing the scenario four times beforehand and spinning out consistently, that he actually told Eric Bischoff he couldn't do it.

After being ultimately talked back onto the ledge, however, it would later come to light that just as Sting was set to descend, the wrestler and stunt workers realised they actually had the kit set-up backwards!

With the tragic incident involving a similar stunt and Owen Hart still yet to come to pass, Sting would admit that had they not quickly fixed the problem, "... if I’d stepped over and done it, the same thing that happened to Owen would have happened to me."