WHEN I TOLD MY PARENTS I WANTED TO BE A PRO-WRESTLER I DON’T THINK THEY TOOK ME SERIOUSLY
Lyra Valkyria may be one of the toughest women in the WWE but her alter-ego Aoife Cusack is just a normal girl from Dublin who had an unusual dream
WHEN Aoife Cusack was growing up in Clarehall, north Dublin, it was her younger brother Darragh who was mad about watching American wrestling on the TV. Like lots of young boys, he loved the theatrics, the shouting and the intense rivalries. Then, like lots of kids, he grew out of it and moved on to something else.
But his sister, much to her own surprise, found she really missed the daily dose of bronzed, long-haired wrestlers throwing each other around a ring in front of screaming crowds. ‘Darragh was the one who always put it on the telly,’ she explains. ‘That’s how I ended up watching it, but really only out of the corner of my eye. It’s when he stopped watching it that I realised how into it I was.
‘I’d be asking him, “are you not going to throw it on?” Then I ended up being the one paying for it on pay-per-view and it evolved from there. I never imagined it would captivate me the way it has, but here we are.’
Here we are indeed. A petite brunette with huge brown eyes and a soft Dublin accent, she now goes by Lyra Valkyria, a name she chose from a series of fantasy graphic novels she adored as a teenager, Skulduggery Pleasant, by Irish author Derek Landy. ‘I was so passionate about them as a kid, they were my whole reason to be,’ she says.
Lyra clearly does nothing by half. Her commitment to her passions has paid off big time – she is the most recent Irish addition to the stable of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) fighters to have clinched a coveted title. In October she beat Becky Lynch, one of the world’s biggest female wrestling stars who also happens to be Irish, to become the NXT – one of the WWE’s main brands – women’s champion. Tonight she takes part in NXT: Stand & Deliver, the warm-up act for tomorrow night’s Wrestlemania, WWE’s biggest pay-per-view event. While it’s not the Olympics, wrestling is absolutely huge in the US, where the industry is listed as being worth well over $6billion.
Also massive in Japan and the UK, it combines athletics with theatrical performance. It’s wellknown that ‘winners’ of events are predetermined, but none of this stops pro-wrestling shows from being some of the most-watched