To say Bianca Belair is eligible for hometown-hero status is to put things lightly. With Knoxville, Tennessee, being her humble stomping grounds, she began as a four-time state hurdles champion at Austin-East before graduating as a track star from the University of Tennessee. Later, she went on to achieve national acclaim in CrossFit, and she climbed even further to dizzying new heights on one of the world’s tallest entertainment stages: the WWE.
Still in the WWE, Belair currently boasts the rare accolade of being a three-time women’s champion, with one of those reigns still holding the record for being the longest tenured in the sport. While any of us mere mortals might’ve hung our hats on that milestone alone, she is still pushing the scope of her career with a brand-new Hulu-based docuseries “Love & WWE: Bianca & Montez,” which features the behind-the-scenes narrative of an existence in the pro-wrestling world as lived by her and her husband, fellow WWE superstar Montez Ford.
Though Belair seems naturally wired to achieve this sort of greatness, she has had to push herself beyond previous limits in pursuit of these seemingly unfathomable goals. There were moments along the way when she was nearly forced to give up her athletic pursuits altogether. After being an All-SEC and All-American competitor at UT, a nationally recognized CrossFit icon and a renowned powerlifter, she had come to a point where she found herself often injured and disheartened by a rare medical condition referred to as “slipping rib syndrome.” Between 2012 and 2016, she might have forever settled down in the normalcy of the business world as a sales representative in Atlanta. During that time period, she was even turning down casting offers for reality series such as “American Ninja Warrior.”
Luckily for everyone, chance, potent desire and good old-fashioned determination once again sent Belair championing forth fatefully into the world of athletics and through the perhaps unforeseen front doors of NXT, a world-renowned WWE developmental brand. That’s right: she went straight into the world of professional wrestling.
Why professional wrestling all of a sudden? The story, as Belair told it to journalist Chris Van Vliet, is that the world-renowned Olympic powerlifter-turned-WWE superstar Mark Henry had witnessed her doing her thing online in a CrossFit video. Recognizing her potential as both an athletic performer and an entertainer with personality, Henry sent her a message regarding upcoming NXT tryouts. He knew what he had seen and was sure of her potential.
In April 2016, after two tryouts, Belair officially found her pro-wrestling career entry point in the NXT at the WWE Performance Center, a school/training facility located in Orlando, Florida. Determined to work around the pains of her slipping rib, she trained hard and in only four months would make her NXT debut on September 29, 2016, in a loss to a wrestler known as “Aliyah.” While this was her ring debut, she didn’t actually make her televised debut until April 2017, some 10 matches later as somewhat of a minor figure quickly eliminated in a woman’s battle royal.
Belair’s next televised appearance (and perhaps more “official” TV debut) wouldn’t be until 13 matches later on July 13, 2017, at the Mae Young Classic, where she would celebrate a singles win over Sage Beckett in a first-round bout. This triumphant emergence was only to be upset the following night with a loss to Kairi Sane in the tournament’s second round. Regardless, this second match dropped more than a few jaws due to Belair’s impressive 450 splash move and memorable hair-whipping performance. Win or lose, with her undeniable talent, athletic prowess and freshly styled whip trademark, she was already showing her ability to outshine the competition.
Though the business had handed her a challenging, title-evasive first three years to endure with multiple near-miss championship climbs and lost tournaments and battle royals, she had succeeded in becoming a major contender on numerous occasions. In 2018, she had celebrated the beginning of a 17-match, 367-day undefeated streak (title contests excluded) and had even made her first NXT-WWE crossover WrestleMania debut.
In May 2019, a month after a preliminary fatal-four-way for one of the greatest NXT pay-per-view events (if not pro-wrestling PPV events ever) – NXT Takeover: New York – Belair would utilize her track and CrossFit prowess to win her third WWE Performance Center combine, a serious, nationally graded athletic competition that has much less to do with the entertainment side of the business. There, she conquered category after category, finishing first in the women’s broad jump, vertical jump, agility drill, trap-bar deadlift and strong run. She was runner-up in the 1,000-meter row and medicine-ball toss and placed third in the dynamic bench press.
No wonder she was known as the “EST of NXT” even early in the game, as there was little doubt that she was the “pretti-est, badd-est, strong-est …”
While NXT found it quite enthralling to have Belair endlessly nipping at the heels of each title defender – including Ember Moon, Shayna Baszler and even the current world champion Rhea Ripley – who dared tread in her coveted domain, she never actually won the gold. But everything thus far was merely a prelude of what was to come: her rise to WWE stardom.
Broadcast in April 2020 at the eerily unattended, pandemic-era WrestleMania 36, Belair made her agile, hair-whipping entry into the WWE “Raw” roster. While that WrestleMania lacked an in-house audience, it was to officially hold the viewership record of a combined 967 million views. She pierced this strange yet provocative event with an assist from her husband’s “Street Profits” tag win, an event that spilled its feud over into subsequent “Monday Night Raw” appearances, on which she made her victorious break targeting and defeating key participant Zelina Vega. Though Belair had competed on the WWE mainstage before, it was always under the heading of NXT. Now she was not only playing with the big boys and girls, but actually as one of them. Before long, she had accumulated quite the victory run on “Raw” and “WWE Main Event” while also making her way onto the “WWE SmackDown!” roster, debuting there in October 2020.
In the “SmackDown!” roster was where she would finally – after some five years of chasing – proudly and emotionally raise a title belt to a fully live audience at WrestleMania 37. Her hair-whipping performance over Sasha Banks and trademark kiss of death had delivered into the world a new and historic “SmackDown!” women’s champion.
At this point, it’s notable to mention that 2021 had seen Belair go from 85th in 2018 to first in Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s list of the sport’s top 150 females – not a bad climb after only three years.
Seemingly nothing could dampen this arc, as she would win the “Raw” women’s championship over her hardened rival, Becky Lynch, via an all-out war at WrestleMania 38 in April 2022. The buzz was full-on, and Belair had become a larger-than-life figure. Her majestic entrance to WrestleMania 38 alone felt like an event worthy of Prince. This laser-heavy, marching band-accompanied spectacle was proudly rounded off by the announcer’s grand proclamation: “From Knoxville, Tennessee … Bianca Belair!”
This championship title would become her record reign, firstly as the longest-reigning African American world champion (male or female), and then as longest-reigning women’s champion of the modern era (420 days). She managed to retain it throughout many heated contests and near-loss scrambles including her next WrestleMania, the 39th. (This while also maintaining her coveted status as undefeated at WrestleMania, a record she still holds to this day.)
Belair finally lost this magnificent title to Asuka in May 2023, only to regain it from Charlotte Flair three months later. Ironically, that particular reign was to be marked as the title’s shortest in history at a record 1 minute and 35 seconds (see SummerSlam 2023 and Iko Sky’s Money in the Bank contract). Perhaps superstar status rarely comes without a sense of humor.
While this article is only capable of highlighting a mere handful of moments from the astonishing career of one of WWE’s most beloved current superstars, Belair has been involved in around 32 major PPV events and nearly 500 matches in total. To look at her history in Royal Rumble events alone would warrant another article. The most recent Royal Rumble took place in January of this year, followed also by her February involvement at this year’s Elimination Chamber in Perth, Australia.
Like many superstars past and present, Belair and Ford are currently charging down the challenging Road to WrestleMania. The couple’s entertaining and popular docuseries details these efforts, as well as both the professional and personal challenges they face in their sometimes-tricky relationship.
WrestleMania 40 is set to be an electric event, hosting the climax to some of the industry’s most popular and heated feuds in recent pro-wrestling history. Whether or not you follow the wild world of WWE, there’s likely to be some emotions stirred within you concerning this yearly spectacle, and, furthermore, having a locally grown participant to root for is downright engaging. We already know that Belair knows how to make a scene.
As with her early days in NXT, Bianca Belair has proven that she can also reach the top of WWE. In a recent GQ interview, she firmly declared, “I call myself the ‘EST of WWE.’ I’m the strongest, the fastest, the roughest, the toughest, the quickest, the greatest, the best – and I want to do everything myself, and I want to give 110 percent. That’s not just me being a WWE superstar, but that’s me training in the ring, that’s me working out, that’s me studying my promos and that’s also me making my own gear.”
Now that’s a hometown hero.
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