Sarah Bäckman is one of the very few Scandinavian professional wrestlers to have been signed by the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). She signed the contract in 2013 but effectively asked to be released from it in 2014, not being seen on the WWE scene ever since. In fact, she had a relatively low profile on the arm wrestling scene as well, reappearing recently at the Arm Wrestling Competition 2020 in June.

In fact, Sarah was mostly known for her arm wrestling prowess as opposed to her performance in the WWE. She began the sport when she was just 14 years old, quickly rising through the ranks.

Currently, she is an 8-time World Arm Wrestling Competition champion and 11-time Swedish Arm Wrestling Competition champion.

All of these titles seem very well deserved as she can be seen defeating opponents without even trying in the recent video showing her in the 2020 competition.

Her primary stage-name that she is known for is Shara, but it was very short-lived as her performance in the USA was cut short by issues on acquiring a visa. Finally, being able to perform in February 2014, she later requested severance of her contract in April of the same year.

Not many have researched why she decided to end her contract like that but, her subsequent marriage in 2015 seems to have given some clues that she wanted out of the sport.

Ushering a new era of female wrestlers

Although Sarah’s wrestling career was not as extensive as other female fighters, she is still regarded as the best Nordic female wrestler in the 21st century. The moment she signed up for the WWE she saw a developing interest from her home-country companies.

The most persistent industry to keep chasing her was undoubtedly the betting industry. Due to the fact that the majority of Nordic countries had a state-monopoly on betting, all the local betting brands had to move elsewhere.

Without having the restriction of location, some of the best Norwegian betting websites commonly referred to as beste odds sider quickly started to build a Wrestling-related betting page to cover this new market of fans.

Most of these sites knew that featuring Nordic fighters was not enough of a “kick” for local fans, so creating a female-only page was the next step to take.

According to remarks from Scandinavian fans, seeing Sarah have her own dedicated page on some of their favorite betting sites was what got them interested in her in the first place. This interest then soon grew into participation in the Arm Wrestling sport as well as fans migrated from sport to sport.

Although her WWE career was short-lived, Bäckman can say with confidence that she introduced a lot of new Swedish and Norwegian fans to the sport, thus giving her quite a lot of credit for the sport’s popularity in the Nordics.