All Elite Wrestling Women's Champion Britt Baker has praised two of her WWE counterparts for their influence on her generation of women's wrestling.
Speaking during a panel at the Steel City Comic Con, Baker credited both Bayley and Sasha Banks as being influential forces when she was beginning her career as a professional wrestler.
"Those are two of my role models that I watched when I was first training to be a wrestler," Baker replied when asked which WWE wrestlers inspired her. "That was five years ago. When I was training, they were main-eventing NXT TakeOver. That was when the tides were turning and they kind of paved the way for my generation of wrestling. Even though they are still in my generation, they came before me," she added.
During an appearance on Renee Paquette's Oral Sessions podcast back in March, Baker described herself as a Bayley fangirl and said that the SmackDown star sent her a complimentary DM in the wake of Baker's highly-praised match with Thunder Rosa on AEW Dynamite.
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"I had a nice message exchange with the other role model in wrestling," Baker said, referring to Bayley. "One of my favorites, I'm literally a fangirl of her."
Baker became the AEW Women's Champion when she ended Hikaru Shida's year-long reign as champ back in May at AEW's Double Or Nothing pay-per-view. The match took place just a few hours before WWE seemingly took a cheap shot at Baker and AEW by sharing a clip in which Baker was squashed by Nia Jax while serving as enhancement talent.
As you might recall, Baker actually appeared on WWE programming while she was under contract with AEW when she was caught on camera at NXT Takeover: War Games 2019 watching her real-life partner Adam Cole in the main event.
"Tony [Khan] didn’t care at all because after that night, I was the top Google search of that show, the entire NXT show was Britt Baker because of that one little blip they showed on TV," Baker said of the incident on a Talk Is Jericho appearance in April of 2020.
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