15 Things We Just Learned From Kurt Angle About WWE & His Career

9. The Most Difficult Manoeuvres He Had To Learn

Angle's transition from amateur wrestling to the pro business was basically a baptism of fire: he was suddenly charged with learning the opposite of what had defined his rise to becoming a Gold Medallist, and when asked what the hardest manoeuvres he had to learn were, he painted a great picture of the clash of cultures:

"The hardest part was giving my body up for someone to throw around. When you're an Olympic gold medallist and a world champion free-style wrestler, nobody took me down, nobody threw me, it was hard to turn off those instincts. As a matter of fact, when I was starting out, I came very close to hurting some of the other wrestlers, because I didn't know how to tone it down. I carried that with me for a couple of years - it took me a long time to get comfortable. I had to take the approach of "let those guys beat me up and don't beat them up" so I had to learn to just give my body to them and trust them to do what they had to."

That mentality actually impacted his first years in WWE, where he didn't have a lot of offence out of fear of hurting anyone. And as for the finishers he's taken that hurt the most?

"I never had a problem with finishers. Everybody's finisher that I've taken - I think - is relatively safe. I can't think of anyone's that really hurt me. Not that they didn't make me sore for days. I would say the toughest one is probably the choke slam. It depends on how you land. A lot of guys don't want to land high up on their back because they don't want to land on their head so they drop the lower part of their body, but that gives you a whip-lash effect. I learned just to take it as hard as I could with my upper back and that allowed me to keep my neck from jarring..."

Smart tips there.