WrestleMania 43 in Riyadh: When Global Politics Body-Slams Sports Entertainment

WrestleMania 43: The Last Empire’s Circus Comes to Riyadh

JEDDAH—If the Roman Empire had survived into the age of fiber-optic thongs and pre-show drone ballets, it would have looked exactly like WrestleMania 43. On a makeshift desert moonscape ten miles outside Riyadh, 82,000 pilgrims—half of them jet-lagged Americans clutching prescription heartburn medication, the rest a coalition of Saudis on government-sponsored “fun visas,” Indian IT contractors who won tickets in a raffle, and British stag parties that confused this with a different kind of oil-based entertainment—gathered to watch oiled giants pretend to maim one another. The ticket app crashed twice, which the Ministry of Happiness promptly rebranded as “interactive suspense.”

The card itself was geopolitical kabuki. In the main event, reigning champion “Nuclear” Nicolo Volkov—marketed as “The Siberian Sanction” despite being a part-time DJ from Tampa—defended against “Samurai” Joe Tanaka, a 320-pound Hawaiian whose entire knowledge of bushido comes from a Netflix anime. Their entrances alone required three cease-fires: Volkov rode a repurposed Russian icebreaker through a CGI Arctic, while Tanaka descended from the roof on a life-size origami crane, triggering a minor sandstorm that the local imam politely called “an act of God with sponsorship opportunities.” Somewhere in the VIP boxes, Jared Kushner took notes.

Back in the real world, oil futures dipped 2.4 percent on rumors that the pyro budget exceeded Qatar’s annual defense spending. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian broadcast cut to commercial every time Volkov waved a flag, and Russian state TV pixelated Tanaka’s crane for being “insufficiently Slavic.” Everyone involved pretended this was normal.

The women’s match—branded “The Liberation Ladder Match”—was billed as historic, mostly because it was the first time Riyadh allowed females to climb scaffolding in public without a male guardian holding the ladder. Competitors entered to a remix of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” overlaid with a 30-person male chorus chanting “Vision 2030.” The victor, Lebanese-Canadian star “Beirut Banshee” Layla Kassis, celebrated by spray-painting a smiley face on an already-smiling billboard of the Crown Prince. Twitter called it progress; Amnesty International called it Tuesday.

Undercard highlights included the Bollywood Boyz losing the tag titles to a Scandinavian death-metal duo whose finishing move is literally filing their taxes in real time, and a 47-minute “Crypto-Cage” bout where the only way to win was to mint an NFT faster than your opponent. The latter ended in a tie when both wrestlers discovered the blockchain had melted inside the steel. The commentators dubbed it “a metaphor for post-Bretton Woods capitalism,” then cut to a TikTok of a camel drinking Pepsi.

The global economy took notice. Chinese streaming giant iQiyi paid a record $200 million for exclusive rights, then accidentally aired the Filipino dub where all promos are voiced by a single overworked actor named Boy. European Parliament briefly debated whether the event violated sanctions on theatrical aggression. Ultimately they decided it was less harmful than TikTok, though they encouraged citizens to watch on pirate sites “for the sake of the climate.”

As the fireworks spelled “ONE WORLD, ONE RING” in twelve languages (the Arabic was backwards, but no one pointed it out), the crowd dispersed into a fleet of air-conditioned buses powered, naturally, by the very petroleum futures that had tanked that morning. Delegates from COP 29 watched from a Jeddah safe house, calculating the carbon footprint against the GDP boost. The consensus: if humanity is going to burn, it might as well do so with a steel chair shot to the head.

Back in the locker room, the wrestlers posed for an Instagram photo with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund managers who had booked them. Everyone smiled, because smiling is now tariff-free under the new trade accord. Tomorrow the ring will be dismantled, the desert will reclaim the sand, and somewhere in a Moscow sports bar, a drunk fan will insist the Siberian Sanction is actually a deep-state psy-op. He’ll be right, of course, but only by accident. That, too, is part of the script.